Fake Tales of San Francisco

"Fake Tales of San Francisco" is a love letter to authenticity written in fury's handwriting. The song builds from a wiry, nagging guitar figure into something almost sneering in its delivery — Turner's vocals here are perhaps the most plainly contemptuous on the entire debut, narrating the particular type he's observed: the suburban-turned-bohemian affected intellectual, name-dropping cities and scenes he's constructed from second-hand mythology. The production is dry and close-mic'd, which suits the song's confrontational intimacy — nothing is prettied up or given reverb-assisted distance. But what saves "Fake Tales" from being merely mean is the self-awareness running underneath it. There's an uncomfortable tension between the observation and the observer, a sense that Turner knows the accusation can turn inward. The Sheffield-versus-romanticized-elsewhere dynamic is very specific and very real: young people in unglamorous industrial cities watching peers perform cosmopolitan identities borrowed from cooler postcodes. The track became a kind of anthem for the authenticity-obsessed indie scene, though with more intelligence than most scene anthems manage. It's the song you play when you've had enough of something or someone performing rather than existing.