Pop Reviews : Teenage Fan Club’s Screaming Ecstasy

What fan clubs do you suppose the members of the Scottish band Teenage Fan Club would join?

Definitely Crazy Horse’s. In its Los Angeles debut on Thursday, the quartet filled the Whisky with the thick haze of guitar ecstasy, adorning a framework of monster riffs with squealing, screaming, pounding fretwork.

But the TFC isn’t just a purveyor of Glasgow grunge. These guys could also be card-carrying members of the consolidated power-pop affiliates, buoying their massive sound with the lilt of ancient British sources like the Beatles, Badfinger and even the Dave Clark Five.

When those two contending strains combined in their purest forms, the band recalled a potent L.A. group that worked the Whisky in the new wave days, the Plimsouls. Modern reference points would be the mumble ‘n’ drone aesthetic of alternative-rock heroes Dinosaur Jr. and Nirvana.

The question is whether the band can be distinctive enough to stand out in an increasingly crowded corner. The evidence on their new album “Bandwagonesque” is pretty strong, especially the highly developed sense of pop craft and the budding sense of irony.

But at the Whisky they were pretty one-dimensional as performers, showing only the over-exuberant side of four fresh-faced lads on a rock ‘n’ roll lark. When you can crank up an intense vocal that echoes prime John Lennon, you owe it to yourself to put some anger and some of the bigger world behind it.