Merge Records
2005
Man-Made
About This Album
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.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,5,8 and 9)

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