Graham Reid | | 2 min read
Beach Weather
Back in the late Eighties/early Nineties there was a very popular synth-pop dance band called Fan Club. Because of the background of their singer Aishah and tours there, Fan Club were also successful in Malaysia.
Their joyful single Sensation damaged the charts here and their subsequent dance-pop proved club-friendly as well as also making the charts.
They didn't make music that much interested me but because they were undeniably successful – and the song W.G.A.F. (Who Gives a Fuck) was a bit more out there -- I spend a day in the studio with them.
Unfortunately it wasn't that interesting.
They'd laid down the vocals so I spent most of the day watching them move around sine waves on a computer screen and repeating beats or something.
That said, when the album was finished I wrote, “If it was all too easy to write off The Fan Club after the first album they are impossible to ignore now. The songwriting and arrangements are a huge leap ahead from [the] Sensation [album].”
I only mention this because there's a new young Auckland band which has just released their debut EP Towards the Sun that packages up their short run of singles with three new songs.
This new and very different Fan Club are a straight-ahead pop-rock four-piece band who write lyrically interesting songs and nail down them down into tight songs with a bit of post-grunge edge . . . and maybe even a smidgen of a raw Alanis Morissette.
They cite Paramore, Royal Blood, Radiohead (whose High and Dry they cover live) and even Pink Floyd as influences although the latter more for listening than shaping anything on the impressive EP.
The opener Beach Weather is their “happy song” and closer DYK (Do You Know) is angry but cathartic and delivered over a compelling drums.
The band – Emma Wagner (vocals), Tilly Wells (bass), Caleb Young (guitar), Thomas Christie (drums), all under 19 – told Marty Duda of 13th Floor that when they listened back through their released songs and demos there seemed to be an overall theme in their songs which told a story.
That creates the arc of Towards the Sun.
Fan Club – who won the Auckland Central section of the Smoke-Free Rock Quest – also betray a keen sense of melody, dynamics and pop structure (the upward momentum of Westbound) and know when to keep things tense and constrained as on the opening passages of Sedate before it explodes with fury: “I've been sick of the same conversations, no space to breath, holding, myself to your expectations”.
And how is this for the opening lyric of Rough over a rippling piano part?
“You liked me and you like her, why choose when you can have both . . .”
That makes you want to hang in and hear where the song is going. And vocalist Wagner really unleashes with impressive power and . . . okay, no spoiler alert.
That's clever and Fan Club – very much of their generation as the title of the angry No Caller ID attests – are the kind of young band you want to hang in with.
I'd be glad to spend a day in the studio watching them work.
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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.
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