Looking at my laptop’s folders, it appears that I downloaded Teenage Fanclub’s 1991 album Bandwagonesque in 2014, which seems so strange to me. I remember it being one of those albums that I got switched on to from that first listen. The first half has hit after hit. ‘The Concept’, ‘December’, ‘What You Do to Me’, ‘Star Sign’… all 10/10’s. The first two I wish I could have written about, but you can just hear them for yourselves. The latter will have their posts some day. But today’s song, ‘Metal Baby’, starts off the album’s second half, carrying on the run of good tunes.

The track is about a girl who is into her metal music, has the track’s narrator around her little finger and eventually leaves him to be a groupie with a metal band. A simple song of love and loss, I suppose. But it’s delivered with such an ease that makes it comfortable to listen to. All these interesting chords and progressions. Guitarist Norman Blake sings well over it, accompanied by some nice harmonies too. The band have made it clear that one of their biggest influences was Alex Chilton and his work with Big Star from the 70s, and you can clearly hear that here if you’re familiar with that stuff. I guess if you want to be cynical about it, it’s one track of Fanclub where they really where that influence on their sleeve. But man if they don’t do it well.

One thing I’ve noticed which you don’t have to really care about but what I thought was interesting, is that ‘Metal Baby’ kind of mirrors ‘The Concept’ in a way. Musically, that is. If you sing the ‘I didn’t want to hurt you’ chorus from the latter with the ‘I’m not the sort of person’ chorus/bridge from the former, you’ll notice how similar they are. They are in different keys, so you’d have to adjust for that. I don’t know, thought that was worth saying. But happy listening, you can’t go wrong listening to their other albums too.