[4] Frith said the band "continued to mess with ['Teenbeat'] for years", and he called the piece "a beautiful living and breathing beast that was always fun to play and had all kinds of hidden subtleties.
"[5] Recordings of early versions of "Teenbeat" before its release on Legend appear on Volume 1: Beginnings in The 40th Anniversary Henry Cow Box Set.
The music increases in intensity, augmented by a wordless chorus of Maggie Thomas, Sarah Greaves and Cathy Williams (three of Henry Cow's road crew), and culminates in "Teenbeat"'s opening tune.
Meanwhile, the bass plays a walking line in four straight 8-beat phrases that cycle independently from what's happening on top; on drums, Cutler accentuates this 4 + 4 feel rather than the 3 + 3 + 4 division in the melody.
Towards the end of the track, the guitar solo winds down and is replaced by the "Teenbeat" tune on Frith's violin, after which, Piekut wrote, "the song wraps up quickly with a bounding bridge to nowhere.
[11] He said "Teenbeat" follows with "pointillistic splashes of sound" that become "a harmonically secure chorale", reaching a crescendo before "dissolv[ing] into a collage of rapidly looming jump-cuts".
[14] Paul Stump stated in The Music's All that Matters: A History of Progressive Rock that the placing of the organ and guitars in the stereo mix in the opening of "Teenbeat" is a good example of the "pointillist effect" Henry Cow achieved in many of their recordings.
[15] He suggested that Frith's "blistering and initially conventional-sounding" guitar solo in "Teenbeat Reprise" illustrates the band's incorporation of techniques they learnt from exploring their instruments while improvising.