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Avg: 4.0 (167 ratings)
- Date Released: May 2, 2005
- Genre: Alternative/Punk
- Style: Indie Rock
- Label: Merge Records
A very strong new album from a beloved band
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We Say...
Late albums by formalists tend to be for fans only. But even if your taste for Teenage Fanclub is closer to admiration than adoration, it’s hard to miss how strong Man-Made is. If the formalist pop-rock they mine can sound antique, the Glasgow quartet is more like "lived-in," utterly comfortable with their sonic vocabulary (the Four B’s — Beatles, Beach Boys, Byrds, and Big Star — are the guideposts), carefully producing music for their fellow schlubs with 64-track imaginations.
Part of the group’s strength is in numbers: three of the four members, Norman Blake, Gerard Love and Raymond McGinley, write and sing lead, and each gets four songs on Man-Made. The title is obviously a play on the idea of the rock album as hand-crafted object, and the slow, basic grooves of songs like Love’s “Save” and Blake’s superb leadoff “It’s All in My Mind” tend to hit the ear before the songs themselves. They make themselves comfortable pretty instantly; even when McGinley revs the tempo on (har har) “Slow Fade” they throw in a needling little organ deep in the mix to connect with everything else. Cool wah-wah solo, too. “I’m alive and I’m alone/ I love this live and all I’ve known,” the band harmonize during the chorus of McGinley’s “Nowhere.” Nothing wrong with that, especially if it can carry an album — and it can. -
They Say...
Once hailed as the second coming of Big Star, the trio of singer/songwriters who make up Teenage Fanclub -- Norman Blake, Gerard Love, and Raymond McGinley -- have attained the status of something more along the lines of a Scottish Crosby, Stills & Nash. Which is to say they are a band of equals with all three members consistently cranking out song after song of well-written melodic rock that references such icons of the genre as the Byrds, the Beach Boys, Badfinger, and yes Big Star. With 2005's Man-Made can Tortoise be added to that list? Well, sort of. Recorded at Tortoise frontman John McEntire's Soma studio in Chicago with McEntire at the controls and sometimes the keys, Man-Made is both all that one might hope a paring of classicist power pop and avant-garde post-rock could be, and then, depending on which end of the indie rock spectrum you're coming from, perhaps slightly less. Upon hearing that the notoriously homebound boys from Glasgow were going to board a plane to the States, and enter the mad science lab of the man known for odd time signatures and archaic keyboards it raised expectations -- perhaps unfairly -- that the resulting album would be something unexpected and maybe even revolutionary. However, as is the tradition with most power pop craftsmen, the general approach is to aim for the perfect pop song each time out, resulting in albums that are rarely disappointing for fans, but which can rarely claim innovation or edginess. Happily, Man-Made lives up to this tradition and is as good an album as any Teenage Fanclub has made since Grand Prix. That said, given the high expectations of working with a maverick iconoclast like McEntire, even a longtime fan might be somewhat disappointed that the album isn't more than yet another solid Fanclub release. Though McEntire's production is subtle, his unique aesthetics are definitely apparent on Man-Made as odd keyboards and sundry other inevitably electronic apparatuses bubble and bleep just below the surface of fuzzed-out guitars, chugging basslines, and layered vocals. Primarily, the album takes off where the new tracks recorded for the band's stellar 2003 retrospective, Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty-Six Seconds: A Short Cut to Teenage Fanclub, left off. To these ends, Love's "Time Stops" and "Fallen Leaves" once again find the sweet-voiced bassist delving into sun-soaked Left Banke meets Moody Blues territory. Similarly, McGinley's "Feel" evinces a hang-loose '70s West Coast vibe that sounds something like Roger McGuinn fronting Hotel California-era Eagles, and if Teenage Fanclub ever had any shoegaze tendencies Blake reveals all with the blissful and Hammond-happy "Slow Fade." While nobody could accuse Teenage Fanclub of taking huge creative risks, more often than not the tracks on Man-Made do resemble something along the lines of '70s soft rock group America backed by Stereolab -- which is a very cool thing.
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| 01. |  |
It's All In My Head |
3:41 |
|
| 02. | |
Time Stops |
4:11 |
|
| 03. | |
Nowhere |
3:40 |
|
| 04. | |
Save |
4:14 |
|
| 05. | |
Slow Fade |
1:54 |
|
| 06. | |
Only With You |
4:21 |
|
| 07. | |
Cells |
3:20 |
|
| 08. | |
Feel |
3:51 |
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| 09. | |
Fallen Leaves |
3:31 |
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| 10. | |
Flowing |
3:01 |
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| 11. | |
Born Under A Good Sign |
3:00 |
|
| 12. | |
Don't Hide Hide |
4:00 |
|
12 Total Tracks, 42:44 Total Length
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Credits
- Gerard Love - Group Member // Francis MacDonald - Group Member // John McCusker - Violin // John McCusker - Viola // Raymond McGinley - Group Member // John McEntire - Piano // John McEntire - Engineer // John McEntire - Mixing // Peter Love - Layout Design // Norman Blake - Group Member // Annabel Wright - Artwork // Nick Brine - Engineer // Nick Brine - Editing // Tim Iseler - Engineer // Tim Iseler - Editing
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