POP MUSIC REVIEW : A Tuneful, Personable Teenage Fanclub

Most bands that mine ‘60s and ‘70s musical veins--as the Scottish quartet Teenage Fanclub did on Saturday at the Palace--do so to fuel either angry statements or snide cultural jokes.

But this show was neither catharsis nor comedy, although it was closer to the latter, what with an encore of the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s “Goody Goody Gumdrops.”

It’s not as if we haven’t heard this tight blend of power and pop before, from Big Star (Alex Chilton’s “Free Again” provided another encore) to L.A.’s own Redd Kross.

And Saturday it wasn’t quite as rich as it could have been, with guitarist Raymond McGinley, one of the group’s three lead singers, silent due to a sore throat, leaving guitarist Norman Blake and bassist Gerard Love to do their best on the precise harmonies that mark many of the Fanclub songs.

But that diminished neither the attractive tunefulness nor the personable Fanclub presence--Blake may have set a record for sincere “thank yous” to the crowd. And doesn’t that beat a snarl or a sneer any day?

Opening act Yo La Tengo also mined a familiar vein: the Velvet Underground. But the New Jersey trio is one of the few to really capture the magnetic mystery of the Velvets, a sound that’s like listening to a busted radio picking up a transmission from far away.