While Bandwagonesque became more notorious as the 90s progressed onward for being the album SPIN magazine named album of the year 1991 instead of Nevermind than for anything else– and may still be, depending on its current notoriety and the degree to which people still care about print magazines– I’m going to limit my discussion of that to this sentence, because Bandwagonesque is more than a historical footnote/punchline, it’s a terrific debut album of garage-ish power pop from Teenage Fanclub.
It’s a little too shimmering to call it fully garage, but the noise, distortion, and crunch on the record give it a certain similarity; interestingly enough, subsequent Teenage Fanclub albums tended to go with a cleaner production style. The band started out trying to make a more consciously noise-pop album with this one, working with producer and musician Don Fleming, who had just worked in a similar capacity on Sonic Youth’s Goo. But it was Fleming who encouraged them to use their gifts for harmonizing more than they planned to; that may have been the secret for Teenage Fanclub to break out amidst all the other guitar-pop bands of the era. (They may well have been the best power-pop band of the 90s– or at least for the first half of the decade, until Fountains of Wayne came along.)
The band often wore their Big Star influence on their sleeve– their second album wasn’t just called Thirteen because that’s how many songs were on it– but, even beyond the obvious melodicism and harmonies that draw that comparison, I think this album is most evidently influenced by #1 Record, in terms of the simplicity of many of the songs and their sentiments.
The most obvious example is fourth track “What You Do To Me,” a banger and a gem of a song whose entire lyrics consist of the title repeated as the chorus, and one verse repeated: “What you do to me / I know, I can’t believe / There’s something about you / Got me down on my knees.” But their sense for melody, harmony, and craft made even the Fanclub’s simple songs sing.
The opening track may be the most conceptually complex, in that it attempts to tell a story more than win us with feeling. It’s appropriately enough called “The Concept,” although I suspect less for that reason and more as a sly hint that the concept of rocking and rolling comes down to the subject matter– groupies, or at least one particularly devoted one. (Devoted enough that when she’s at the gig, she takes her car, and she’ll drive us home if it is in a bar, oh yeah.) Still, it’s a fun mid-tempo rocker with the shimmer that defines the album’s production, and “Says she don’t do drugs, but she does the pill” is an iconic line.
Another simple sentiment can be found in the cheekily titled “Alcoholiday,” a breakup song that could be but doesn’t particularly seem influenced by alcohol, and opening with a direct expression that this relationship isn’t working out: “There are things I want to do / But I don’t know if they will be with you.” The rest of the lyrics seem to describe the narrator mostly sleepwalking through the relationship, whether it’s being dragged into bed or elsewhere, making those opening lines an even clearer declaration that he knows this isn’t working and wants out.
“December” has a slower tempo, with the noise and crunch of the guitars really evident at that speed; it’s another simple song, another one about love and relationships, although in this case unrequited, from the chorus: “She don’t even care / But I would die for her love.”
“Star Sign” is another highlight on the album. It starts off with some slow, shimmering guitar for over a minute, before kicking into high-tempo overdrive, with lyrics dismissive of superstitions, lucky charms, and the title: “Hey, there’s a horseshoe on my door / Big deal / And say, there’s a black cat on the floor / Big deal.”
But I think the wisdom it contains is less about whether there is sense or lack thereof in believing in superstition, astrology, or any other mystical method of understanding the unknown, and more about understanding that this too shall pass: “Seen it all before, seen it all before / Given time, these things will change.” And that knowing yourself is more important than knowing what the fates have set out for you: “Well, do you know where you belong? And is your star sign ever wrong?”
“Metal Baby” is another simple song about a fling with a heavy metal fan (callback: “Rock and roll is here to stay,” call-forward: “I sincerely miss those heavy metal bands…“) but one the singer seems to know is just a fling, at least by the time we get to the chorus: “I’m not the sort of person she’ll admit she knows.” By the end of the song, of course, his metal baby has left the city with the heavy metal band.
The second-to-last track (closer “Is This Music?”, like second track “Satan,” is an instrumental), is “Guiding Star,” a pick-me-up for someone feeling down, a reminder to look up, figuratively or even perhaps literally– “perhaps” because the subject of the song is really the speaker’s guiding star. That great first verse really says all there is to be said about the song. (And the second verse even contains a reference to Jesus Christ, just like Teenage Fanclub’s heroes.)
I don’t have a lengthy tale to tell about this album; any story about it beyond the record itself is pretty well contained in the first paragraph here. (Heck, I didn’t even cover all of the tracks; the title line is from “Sidewinder.”) And I can only come up on so many variations of “great power-pop song with great riffs, hooks, and harmonies.” That said, it’s an album that has likely been overlooked with time, and if you weren’t there for it, you should give it a listen. There’s a good reason it got so much critical praise when it did: Bandwagonesque has great melodies, big hooks, gorgeous harmonies, and uses them to express simple yet universal emotions and experiences, mostly about love and relationships. In short, it’s everything you could want from a power-pop album.