Lightships - Electric Cables

With Teenage Fanclub being as fond of hiatus as Thomas Pynchon there comes a time when the individual members feel the need to let off some creative steam. Norman Blake did so last year with the Jonny project and album of the same name and now it’s Gerry Love’s turn with Lightships. Expect nothing out of the ordinary though, this is just what you’d hear if, for a change, only one member of the band wrote their entire new album rather than the usual split of 4 songs each. Therefore as stop-gaps go Electric Cables is a cracker.

The album's highlight comes in at track 5 - 'Silver And Gold'. A fey start builds to a really nice and positive tempo along with a great Sixties garage-style fuzz on the guitar parts and sweet harmonies, giving it slightly more presence than the other songs in the package but really there's not what you'd call a bad number amongst the ten. Which in itself presents the problem to the reviewer of elaborating. It's all good and sounds like every Love-penned song Fanclub have ever recorded so if that in itself is not praise enough for you to go out and pick it up then you'll never do so anyway. Very good chance of it being in my final choices for the year.