When it comes to pop, it’s not breaking-up that’s hard to do, as any study of bands built around an ego-flapping frontman and a shaggy-fringed guitarist will reveal. Even making-up - as The Tears and other acts far less cherishable than the Go-Betweens have demonstrated - isn’t much of a stretch. But growing-up, and having something fearless and wise to say about it, is as rare as hen’s teeth.
Then again, “rare” has always been an apt word for the band Robert Forster and Grant McLennan have co-fronted since 1981, give or take a hiatus in the 90s. Rare, warm, literate, and - in the case of their ninth studio album no less than their classic works of the Eighties – gratifyingly lovely. The quintessential much-loved cult band, they’ve yet to make an album their fans didn’t adore, but the good news is that “Oceans Apart” is one of their finest.
Sonically, at least, this may be no surprise. Produced by Mark Wallis, who wrapped 1988’s “16 Lovers Lane” in shimmeringly sun-shot hues, “Oceans Apart” has moments of blissfully plush pleasure to match that gorgeous predecessor. Equally unsurprisingly, many are McLennan’s, a man with more beaten-gold melodies than Missy Elliot has bling. There’s the jangling shimmer and aah-aah chorus of “Finding You”; the bittersweet “No Reason To Cry”, its lovers’ quarrels and trickled-away time set to a string-soaked Jimmy Webb swell; the swooning heartache of “The Statue”, like Keats sung by an improbably tender Morrissey. Conversely, there’s just as much here, particularly in Forster’s five tracks, driven by mischievous delight in new approaches.
“Here Comes A City” bustles nervily through a Talking Heads-esque angularity that’s as now as next week; “Lavender” laces stylishly flamenco’ed guitars through the story of a girl with a grudge against Sydney, and in “Born To A Family”, Robert lopes through a flirtatiously deadpan family history starring himself as a “golden boy”. Even “Darlinghurst Nights”, a fond scrapbook of years in bohemia, takes its charm from the sense that Forster hasn’t forgotten how seductive those all-nighters, “gut-rot cappuccinos” and “gonna write a movie/gonna go to Caracas” ambitions were.
Ultimately, though, the two most exquisite moments are about coming to terms with mortality, and may have you remembering that Grant and Robert are halfway to the age at which Leonard Cohen recorded his lion-in-winter landmark “Ten New Songs”. McLennan’s stunning “Boundary Rider” revisits the Queensland of “Cattle And Cane” for a meditation on self-doubt that reads like Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” with guitars: “Some days you ride it hard/To stop them getting out/Then comes the day you ride/To stop them getting in”. And, at album’s end, the “snow in the sun” and “October in the rain” of Forster’s wonderfully weary “Mountains Near Delray” hangs in the air like a valedictory sunset.
On this form, they’ve got a head start on Leonard.
by Jennifer Nine