The first sound you hear is a sustained feedback note that hangs in the air with the grace of a dragonfly before an acoustic riff spirals out of it, soaring upwards. It’s blissful and sun-soaked, like a late summer haze blurring out all the details on the
horizon. When voices join the music, they arrive perfectly locked together, honed in on a single melody: “It’s time to move along/and leave the past behind me...” The message is simple. Don’t look back, only forward.
“Foreign Land” is the opening track on Teenage Fanclub’s eleventh full studio album, Nothing Lasts Forever. That track—and the rest of this beautifully rich and melodic album—is the sound of a season’s end, of the last warm days of the year while
nights begin to draw in and thoughts become reflective and more than a little melancholy. That reflection is everywhere on the record, whether on the autumnal folk rock of “Tired of Being Alone” that repositions Laurel Canyon to somewhere deep in the heart of the Wye Valley, the William Blake–quoting “Self-Sedation,” or on the
song that preceded Nothing Lasts Forever’s completion, last year’s “I Left a Light On,” where a spark of hope is kept alight at the end of a relationship.
One of the recurring themes on Nothing Lasts Forever is light, as both a metaphor for hope and as an ultimate destination further down the road. Although the band’s songwriters Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley found themselves touching on similar themes, it was pure coincidence.
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