Teenage Fanclub: Bandwagonesque (transparent yellow vinyl, reissue) [SONY]

Why you'll love it

This transparent yellow pressing uses the Abbey Road remaster and came out for the UK's National Album Day 2023. Spin named Bandwagonesque its album of the year for 1991, ahead of R.E.M.'s Out of Time and Nirvana's Nevermind.

This edition

• Transparent yellow vinyl
• Remastered at Abbey Road Studios
• National Album Day 2023 edition
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

In the spring of 1991, a Scottish band with a taste for fuzz went down to Liverpool's Amazon Studios with producer Don Fleming and came out with a record full of big guitars and even bigger harmonies. Fleming pushed them to stack the vocals, which almost nobody else in the fuzzed-up early 90s was doing, and it became their signature.

"The Concept" opens with a lazy, lovely shuffle that blooms into a sing-along coda, "Star Sign" became their biggest US hit at No. 4 on the Modern Rock chart, and "What You Do to Me" packs a whole crush into one short burst. Those stacked harmonies pay off everywhere, with the warm melodies of Big Star never far away, and "December" and "Alcoholiday" show just how sweet they could be. The leftover studio time even produced a bonus covers record, The King.

NME later put it in its 500 greatest albums, and "The Concept" turned up in the film Young Adult. In 2017 Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie covered the whole album, which is the indie-rock equivalent of a fan letter written out by hand.

Also at Kops: more Teenage Fanclub on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Creation / Sony Music (cat# 19658820521), a reissue of the 1991 album.