Twenty years ago this past February, Teenage Fanclub made their North American network television debut on Saturday Night Live, in an episode hosted, fittingly, by 90210 heartthrob Jason Priestley. Coming in the wake of the band's critically adored 1991 breakthrough Bandwagonesque, the moment effectively marked the Scottish bubble-grunge quartet's Stateside high watermark, before they receded from the indie-rock frontlines with a series of increasingly sporadic and increasingly mellow releases that gradually sucked the power out of their pop.
Now, as per the clockwork 20-year nostalgia cycle, the Fannies' formative fuzz-pop sound has been making something of a resurgence via tunefully dissonant successors like Yuck and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. But rather than pull the obvious move-- i.e., a 20th-anniversary tour of Bandwagonesque that would turn the mock moneybag on the cover into the real deal-- the Fanclub's principal songwriters continue to spiritually drift away from their past: Last year, Norman Blake introduced Jonny, his quirky prog-pop collaboration with Euros Childs of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, and now Gerard Love-- always the McCartney to Blake's Lennon-- attempts an even more pronounced break with Lightships.
Granted, Love's singing and unerringly melodic songwriting haven’t changed; his gentle, congenial voice still hovers somewhere between blissed-out reverie and forlorn resignation, and his new project has an obvious antecedent in "Into the City", Love's hazy-headed standout from the Fanclub's 2010 release, Shadows. However, sonically, Electric Cables represents a more concerted effort to distinguish itself from the traditionalist, Byrdsian country-rock that has essentially been Teenage Fanclub's default mode since 1997's Songs From Northern Britain. Recorded with a gaggle of Glaswegian mates (including past and present Fanclub members Brendan O'Hare and Dave McGowan, and Belle and Sebastian bassist Bob Kildea), Electric Cables' brand of soft-focus psychedelia represents the I Am the Cosmos to Teenage Fanclub's eternal Radio City: A more lush, cerebral rendering of the same pop ethos, drawn from a broader instrumental palette-- mellotrons and flutes vs. analog synths and drum machines-- that blurs the divide between retro and futurist, dreamlike and lucid.
Electric Cables is the sort of album whose deceptively placid presentation belies the richness of detail and sense of purpose at work here. While slow-motion, kaleidoscopic opener "Two Lines" and sister track "Girasol" suggest Lightships is driven by the modest intent to fashion a chillwave Magical Mystery Tour, other songs reveal a more restless spirit, from the disarmingly grim working-class imagery of "Muddy Rivers" ("from the open field to the crowded shore/ we carried the stains from the factory floor") that offsets its perky Wings-ian synth line, to the boisterous extended coda of starry-eyed ballad "Silver & Gold" that plays like Spiritualized's "Medication" in miniature. But it's the self-explanatory mission statement "Stretching Out" that best signifies Lightships' liberating qualities: set to a breezy go-go groove several degrees looser than the Fanclub's workmanlike rock normally allows, the song sees Love getting swept up in a splendorous swirl of laser-guided moogs, fluttering flutes, and acid-dipped, Revolver-esque guitar tones. His bandwagon may be less crowded than it was 20 years ago, but Love still knows what it takes to keep the wheels rolling.
