Amazon.co.uk Review
Life's not fair and it certainly rains a lot in Scotland but no-one could ever accuse spangly Glaswegian power-pop vets
Teenage Fanclub of sounding like washed-out malcontents. Now happy to damn the hit parade and release records at their leisure,
Man Made--the band's first album in five years--arrives on the group's own label; a defiant (or desperate) gesture of self-preservation equivalent to circling the wagons in defence of the bloodline. Musically, little has changed which means that Messrs Blake, Love and McGinley are still applying the post-grunge anti-ageing cream to the respective legacies of Roger McGuinn and Alex Chilton. There are some great tracks--the atypically Fannies "It's All In My Mind", the folk-rock fight against terminal illness on "Cells", the stack-heeled glam stomp of "Born Under A Good Sign" and a fair bit of borrowing from The Raspberries to The Allmann Brothers (plus violin from the Battlefield Band's John McCusker). Blake imagines himself to be "Like a wave, a pulse across the ocean". Love says "There is more to learn than I aim for, so much under the sun I should claim for". McGinley muses that "I'm alive and I'm alone, I love this life and all I've known". They remain free-spirited, life-affirming, resolutely optimistic and damned tuneful. And yet--like Amerigo Vespucci, whoever it was who invented marmite crisps or the Prussians at Waterloo--Teenage Fanclub may never receive the credit they duly deserve.
--Kevin Maidment