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» See reviews for another vivid scene (craven hill/madeline, 2003) » See reviews for from blind to blue (craven hill, 1999) CompilationsWhat a Concept: A Salute to Teenage Fanclub | Left of The Dial: A Pop Tribute to The ReplacementsWhat a Concept: A Salute to Teenage FanclubAmericana-UK.comAmericana-UK.com (UK) - July 2004Current powerpop crop pay their respects to the classic Glasgow based band – and they’re not even dead yet! Tribute albums are always a bit of a hit and miss affair – very rarely do bands who collectively get together to worship their heroes actually better the original versions of the songs they cover, which calls to mind the question – why bother at all? Why not just stick with a greatest hits collection of the original band themselves? The answer probably lies in the bands involved in tribute records doing something creative enough to make the project worthwhile, while at the same time being faithful enough to the originals to maintain the essence of what made the music so special in the first place, and on that count, "What a Concept!", the first tribute to Scottish indie-cum-americana rockers Teenage Fanclub succeeds more often than it fails. The choice of tracks is second to none, with material lifted from every album they’ve released, including a healthy emphasis on some of their later more Byrds-like material when it might have been easy to hark back to their indie beginnings exclusively.Finding songs on the record like the Crash into June cover of "Winter" (from the exquisite "Songs from Northern Britain") or Cloud Eleven’s affectionate translation of "Ain’t That Enough" (so good a song it was Mark and Lard’s single of the week for two weeks running on its original release) is a genuine delight and proof that this is a compilation made by people who genuinely do love the band’s catalogue in its entirety. If there’s a couple of problems with the record, it’s that firstly, by the very nature of the Fannies’ sound, the bands involved in this project do tend to sound an awful lot like each other at times, particularly at the beginning of the record, making it sometimes difficult to differentiate your Andersons from your Receivers from your Mockers. There’s also perhaps too many tracks on the collection for a single CD – on more than one occasion, a track fades out way before the point you want it to, feeling like the label have tried to squeeze as much as is physically possible on to one 80 minute CD. But they’re small gripes in the wider scale of things, and by the time you’ve reached the end of the record and the last notes of Joyride’s exemplary version of "Near You" (the only track here from the maligned "Howdy!" but possibly the best track on the record), you realise that having other bands playing the Fanclub’s music is a positive reminder to us all of just how fantastic an act they were and remain. A good introduction to newcomers and an essential purchase for Fanclub aficionados. www.notlame.com Mark Whitfield Left of The Dial: A Pop Tribute to The Replacements
Read the many reviews here.
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