SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: TEENAGE FANCLUB – DO NOT DARE TO DREAM

TEENAGE FANCLUB
DO NOT DARE TO DREAM
MERGE RECORDS

Being decades on the music scene, with fans needing extra fingers to count your albums, your music is bound to change, with one question being essential there – is the quality changing for better or worse?

These facts and questions don’t escape a single artist or a band, even if you can count them among the legends, and Teenage Fanclub, with hardly a miss among their 12 previous albums (contract filler The King from 1991 probably being the only one), can certainly be called legends.

So, with Do Not Dare to Dream, their 13th album upon us, the question that become open are – is it up to their high standards, did they finally flop, and what are the changes here after all?

Well, the answer to the first question is a tricky yes, and to the second one a definite no. The third answer deals with that tricky yes from the first one – and it is the changes in Teenage Fanclub music. While all their previous albums included songs that were able to hit you immediately, like “Star Sign” from

Bandwagonesque (1991) or “Start Again” from Songs from Northern Britain (1997), no such immediate head blowers here. But the key term here is immediate, as Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley who keep holding the Teenage Fanclub ship have gone for a more layered concept here, instinctively or intentionally, as the listeners have to keep peeling the layers to get to the essence here, and that peeling is quite worth every listener’s time.

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