One of Baltimore's finest Splitsville had contributed to a track to the new Teenage Fanclub
tribute album called "What A Concept".
Released earlier this year in the UK, "What A Concept!" is now available in the
US through both Notlame.com and Amazon.com. The album includes covers by such artists
as Redd Kross, Gigolo Aunts and Superdrag. \ Check out what PopMatters.com says about the entire record and Splitsville's
contribution, "Tears Are Cool"
VARIOUS ARTISTS
What a Concept!: A Salute to Teenage Fanclub
(Not Lame)
by Todd Goldstein
A cover is never just a cover. Next time the opportunity to pay tribute to your favorite artist with a cover song, consider these questions: Should you treat the band's oeuvre as a fluid text, recasting their song in your own image, or should you treat the original version as a treasured artifact, painstakingly recreating the tune so as to highlight the enduring appeal of the primary source? Which option is more exciting? Listenable? Appropriate to the subject matter? What, if anything, does the influenced owe his/her influences?
These questions become even more pressing considering the parties at hand. The band in question is Teenage Fanclub, the tribute album is What a Concept!: A Salute to Teenage Fanclub, and the answer to the head-scratchers above are unclear. A hefty 24 tracks comprise What a Concept!, causing a literal overflow of potential. Whether or not the album fulfills that potential depends on one's definition of power pop, and one's personal views on the cover song, that most contradiction-laden of musical statements.
The power pop aesthetic breaks down into two decades's combined musical values: the melodic jangle of the '60s plus the high-powered crunch of the '70s. The Beach Boys plus Led Zeppelin. The Beatles plus Thin Lizzy. The four sweater-clad Teenage Fanclub members lifted pages whole-hog from their forebears' playbook, combining the Byrds' lush harmonies and 12-string jangle with Big Star's melodic vocabulary, adding a pinch of '90s guitar crunch; and so, the contemporary power pop idiom was born. As music-nerd-reverent of their influences as can be, it seems that Teenage Fanclub forever teetered on the brink of succumbing to the pitfalls of their namesake, becoming little more than a forum for vacuous fawning and solipsistic idol-worship. Instead, they developed a cultish following and spawned an entirely new generation of loud, melodic pop bands whose love of Badfinger, Cheap Trick and Big Star is as much a focus of the music as the perennially infectious tunes. These bands, the direct descendents of Teenage Fanclub's tuneful legacy, make up the roster of What a Concept!'s huge tracklist, for better or for worse.
What a Concept!'s self-congratulatory tone is quite merited (it's about time someone covered "What You're Doing to Me", one of the simplest, most guileless love songs ever written), though a quorum of the 24 bands involved in the project squander this rare opportunity. With few exceptions, the covers on What a Concept!, though well-chosen, hew so closely to their originals as to be nearly indistinguishable from them, save for the occasionally amped-up performance or lightly tweaked guitar tone. Even the lead singers of these bands, who one would hope have honed their own vocal style for years, relinquish all originality for the sake of sounding exactly like Fanclub's lead singers, mimicking Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley's every nasal melodic turn and Limey vowel pronunciation. It's a little creepy.
Of course there are a few bright exceptions, and their presence only highlights what's lacking in the rest of this bloated album. Chewy Marble's version of "Metal Baby" from 1991's classic Bandwagonesque plays up the Tin Pan Alley bounciness merely hinted at in the original, with Blake's lyrics about "a heavy metal show" all the sillier when paired with such a goofy backdrop. The Mockers play a punked-out "Hang On", from Thirteen, adding a much needed dose of loud amongst all the 12-string guitars.
Still, What a Concept!'s clear highlight is Splitsville's electro-damaged cover of "Tears Are Cool", a biting kiss-off tune. Splitsville's dark Jesus and Mary Chain-meets-New Order drone offsets sweet chord changes and a wonderful refrain: "When I see you cry / I think tears are cool." It gives you chills, really; it's a consummate cover -- expanding upon the implicit themes of the original, uncovering surprising new shades of meaning in what initially seemed like a singular artistic statement. Cloud Eleven's tepid version of "Ain't That Enough", whose strict adherence to Teenage Fanclub's original version is almost insulting, makes Splitsville into the heroes of the day.
What a Concept! makes one wonder who the target audience is for these tribute albums, the fans of the consecrated band, or the band itself? I'm sure it would flatter the heck out of Teenage Fanclub to hear 24 energetic karaoke-style versions of their songs, but really, which would show more reverence -- playing a letter-perfect version of your favorite song, or giving it a personal stamp, reinscribing a once-individual artistic statement as a now-universal one? Teenage Fanclub's influence would have been better conveyed by showing the ways in which the band has influenced artists whose work doesn't necessarily sound exactly like Teenage Fanclub. Covers like Splitsville's shoegazery "Tears Are Cool" broaden the scope of the 'tribute album' experience instead of simply stroking the band's ego. Considering the myriad shades of power pop out there, from lo-fi to pop-punk to electro, it seems that more bands, when blessed with the opportunity to play such stellar songs, should have taken it upon themselves to explore more, retooling instead of just lazily parroting (and sadly giving their oft-misunderstood genre a pretty bad name). In the end, What a Concept!: A Salute to Teenage Fanclub amounts to little more than a Teenage Fanclub fanclub, and that's a terrible pun.
Popmatter review Splitsville
