Teenage Fanclub - Endless Arcade - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Foreign Land is the opening track on Teenage Fanclub's 2023 studio album, Nothing Lasts Forever. That track-and the rest of this beautifully rich and melodic album-is the sound of a season's end, of the last warm days of the year while nights begin to draw in and thoughts become reflective and more than a little melancholy. While the vocals and the finishing touches on Nothing Lasts Forever were recorded at Raymond McGinley's place in Glasgow, the music was recorded in an intense 10-day period in the bucolic Welsh countryside at Rockfield Studios, near Monmouth, in August 2022. You can hear the effect of that environment on the record-it's full of soft breeze, wide skies, beauty, and space.

Thanks to the tireless advocacy of the pianist Simon Callaghan, the music of the Derbyshire-born Roger Sacheverell Coke has started to emerge from the obscurity in which it has languished since the composer's death in 1972. Despite showing considerable early promise, Coke remained an outsider in British musical life. Following studies at Eton (until 1931), he took private lessons with Mabel Lander (piano) and Alan Bush (composition) rather than attending university or music college. Coke credited Bush for helping him to find his musical voice, and cited Arnold Bax as a major influence, but his musical sympathies also extended to Bruckner, Mahler and Rachmaninoff at a time when all three were deeply unfashionable among musical cognoscenti. The three cello sonatas featuring on this disc frame the years 1936 to 1941, a very productive period in Coke's life. It is a measure of Coke's confidence in the cello sonatas that he programmed them all in a single concert at the Wigmore in London on 6 October 1951, with the cellist Sela Trau, and invited critics from several of the major broadsheets.

Six years used to be a lifetime in rock 'n' roll. Kids driven by the urgency of youth form bonds, plug in, play gigs, find a tag. Acclaim, exhaustion, over and out. Teenage Fanclub's early years were propelled by that kind of frantic energy (thankfully without the flameout). As outliers of the sound of young Scotland's second wave, they released five albums in their first six years together. The foundations of their national-treasure status were already laid. The tenth Teenage Fanclub LP-Here-arrives six years after the of 2010's hugely acclaimed Shadows (described by Uncut as Inchthe sound of a great group ageing gracefullyInch). Here is the work of a band entirely confident in their own craft-the consolidation of nearly three decades of peerless songwriting and almost telepathic musicianship. Recorded with the band's soundman David Henderson alongside regular drummer Francis Macdonald and keyboard player Dave McGowan in three distinctly different environments (initially at Vega in rural Provence, then at Raymond's home in Glasgow before mixing at Clouds Hill in the industrial heart of Hamburg), it's a record that embraces maturity and experience and hugs them close. As ever, song-wise the Fanclub present a textbook representation of democracy in action, the record offering four each by Blake, Love, and McGinley. From the almighty chime of opener InchI'm In LoveInch (InchWe will fade into history, I'm in love with you love... And I like your trajectory, I'm in love with you loveInch) through the ecstatic soul-search of InchThe First SightInch (InchWill I ever get to see the first sight of a heart that's true?Inch) and the paean to unerring friendship InchWith YouInch (InchI will hide with you from sadness, and bad philosophy / I will laugh with you at madness, and learned stupidityInch), Here is a collection of twelve songs about the only things that truly matter