Alternative Rock is dead; long live demographics. Since virtually all of the great late-Seventies and early-Eighties independent labels got snatched up by the big boys, the sound that once shook the underground has been touted – and accepted – as the latest groovy thing for going on ten years now. The elements have barely budged – enigmatic band names, droning guitars, pretty melodies and exhausted male singers.

Far from the freshness and punch of its previous effort, A Catholic Education, Teenage Fanclub seems to have lapsed into an alternative-rock coma. Bandwagonesque has not a single musical surprise in store: From the pop-culture in-jokes ("Pet Rock," the wordless "Is This Music?") to the faux spiritualism ("Star Sign," "Guiding Star") to the halfhearted stabs at irony ("The Concept," "Metal Baby"), each song lopes along at a slowish midtempo, made more endless by high, thin vocals and moments of decorative guitar feedback. And it's all repetitive repetitive repetitive.

The huge record labels have an excuse to call such homogenized product "alternative" – they're notoriously out of touch. The fans who reject Poison's or Amy Grant's image because those artists are obviously packaged and marketed with numbers-crunching calculation will happily fork over the $12.99 for Teenage Fanclub's equally persuasive images – eye-searing fluorescents and fisheye-lens photos of the unsmiling, unkempt band members. But these pleasantly innocuous melodies are alternative to nothing, certainly not to their antecedents – Bernie Taupin, Kansas and nursery rhymes. Still not convinced? Try singing Boston's "More Than a Feeling" to the tune of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." (RS 623)

ARION BERGER