Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics

Consumer Guide:
  User's Guide
  Grades 1990-
  Grades 1969-89
  And It Don't Stop
Books:
  Book Reports
  Is It Still Good to Ya?
  Going Into the City
  Consumer Guide: 90s
  Grown Up All Wrong
  Consumer Guide: 80s
  Consumer Guide: 70s
  Any Old Way You Choose It
  Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough
Xgau Sez
Writings:
  And It Don't Stop
  CG Columns
  Rock&Roll& [new]
  Rock&Roll& [old]
  Music Essays
  Music Reviews
  Book Reviews
  NAJP Blog
  Playboy
  Blender
  Rolling Stone
  Billboard
  Video Reviews
  Pazz & Jop
  Recyclables
  Newsprint
  Lists
  Miscellany
Bibliography
NPR
Web Site:
  Home
  Site Map
  Contact
  What's New?
    RSS
Social Media:
  Substack
  Bluesky
  [Twitter]
Carola Dibbell:
  Carola's Website
  Archive
CG Search:
Google Search:

Aussie Melody Makers

A compilation of solo work from the Go-Betweens' songwriters

****

ROBERT FORSTER/GRANT MCLENNAN
The Best of the Solo Recordings 1990-1997
Beggars Banquet

Grant Mclennan's fatal heart attack in May 2006 ended Australia's Go-Betweens, a group nearly three decades old that after ten years off had reconvened convincingly in 2000, releasing three albums that promised many more. Neither McLennan nor partner Robert Forster ever stopped writing songs, and they never equated youth with vitality. Their audience was growing old with them--and growing larger, too. Two of the new albums were among their best. Winnowing down the four solo albums a piece of their decade apart, this compilation can't replace the Go-Betweens albums we'll never hear. But they'll give recent converts something more to chew on.

Where Go-Betweens records set McLennan's unruffled romantic discontents against Forster's talkier, knottier excursions, improving both by contrast, these discs don't have that option because they're split up one per artist. So McLennan, who wrote more easily than Forster--his best solo release was the two-CD Horsebreaker Star, while one of Forster's was all covers--gets a surefire album-by-album selection marred only by the static production with which born melodists sometimes flatter themselves. Here, the tunes are too good for that to matter much. There's instant proof of McLennan's gift in the wry, tender, gorgeous opener, "Haven't I Been a Fool," and unending evidence thereafter--the inextinguishable "Lighting Fires," the unapproachable "Surround Me," the ominous "Malibu 69." Ignoring chronology, Forster's more eccentric disc doesn't even lead with "Baby Stones," a refusal of open relationships that soars on his most McLennan-esque tune. But hooks have a way of surfacing with these guys--the keyboard riff of "I Can Do," the herky-jerk repetitions of the title "Danger in the Past." Clearly the surviving Go-Between should keep making music--alone. He is scheduled to record his fifth solo album in London this fall.

Rolling Stone, Sept. 6, 2007