The Go-Betweens

The Go Betweens – Tallulah (Remastered) (1987/2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 38:53 minutes | 506 MB | Genre: Pop Rock, Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Beggars Banquet

Tallulah, the Go-Betweens fifth album, was supposed to be the band’s breakthrough recording in America. That said, its sound is nearly a full-on break with the edginess that began to fade on 1986’s Liberty Belle and The Black Diamond Express. More lush, rounded, and polished, it sounds like a record made in the mid-’80s thanks in large part to Lindy Morrison’s use of drum programs in addition to her trap kit. Add to this the contributions of new member Amanda Brown on violin, oboe, and backing vocals and one has a revamped band. Fans didn’t take to the new sound with kindness initially, but the songwriting of Forster and McLennan was so much more focused and taut, it more than compensates for production errors. Nowhere is this more evident than “Right Here,” the album’s opener. The multi-tracked violins drive the center of the tune sprightly, in an off-rail, cut-time tempo. Robert Vickers’ colorful keyboards and Morrison’s programming are truly adornments, but McLennan’s soulful yet philosophical vocal anchors the tune on bedrock and is supported by a beautiful chorus of backing vocals led by Brown. “You Tell Me,” sung by Forster, leads with distorted guitars held in check by the sweetness of the melody and Morrison’s meld of trap and synthetic drumming. Once more, keyboards counter the guitars as Vickers accents the beat pushing Forster and the wafting backing vocals deeper inside lyric and melody. McLennan’s “Someone Else’s Wife,” is, by contrasts, stark, dark, and suffocating with moody strings accenting the protagonist’s plight. The driving “Cure-ish” riff that kicks off Forster’s “I Just Get Caught Out,” is nearly transcendent; its pained verses are juxtaposed against backing vocalists filling the refrain with a cheery ba-ba-ba-ba-bum. The nearly funky organ and bass swirl of “Cut It Out,” is unlike any Go-Betweens song before or since. The beautiful cello and violin section that fuels “The House That Jack Kerouac Built,” with a shimmering rhythm guitar line, is the perfect maelstrom for Forster’s gorgeous images of stolen illicit love in a dodgy cinema and are topped only by his desperate delivery. This recording may not have had fans of the band swooning at the time, but despite its production it has aged exceptionally well although it remains a product firmly of its time. The raw emotion, vulnerable tenderness and romantic desperation in its songs, textured by the blend of strings and keyboards, adds depth and dimension to this well of fine songs.

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The Go Betweens – Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express (Remastered) (1986/2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 36:54 minutes | 436 MB | Genre: New Wave, Pop Rock, Indie Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Beggars Banquet

Robert Forster’s endearingly fey persona, equal parts Bryan Ferry and gangly bookstore clerk, reaches full flower on the Go-Betweens’ fourth album, which tempers the angularity and occasional claustrophobia of the band’s previous work with a new airiness and nervous romanticism. The lighter sound can be partly attributed to the growing influence of co-leader Grant McLennan, whose wistful “Cattle and Cane” and “Bachelor Kisses” lent grace to the Go-Betweens’ sometimes stilted early records. McLennan’s touch is all over Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express his “In the Core of a Flame,” a love song that manages to be at once tenderhearted and impatient, is a highlight but this is still mostly Forster’s show, and as such is a revelation. The merry, pastoral opener “Spring Rain” serves as notice that this will be a less dour affair than usual, yet, rather than negating Forster’s pained, self-doubting lyrics, the comparatively gentle songs set them off beautifully. “You opened my mail apart at the seams/and now you know I live beyond my means,” he sings at the outset of the swaying “Bow Down,” and the prettiness of the melody makes him sound all the more uneasy. Other highlights include the sublime “Head Full of Steam,” a tale of infatuation so strong that Forster breathlessly reports what his beloved’s parents do for a living before realizing that such trivia is probably “of no importance at all” to anyone but him (which doesn’t stop him from blurting out just a few lines later the earth-shattering news that neither he nor his object of desire have ever had a nickname). Protestations aside, the urgency in his voice makes it clear that the minutiae of love matter very much indeed, and anyone who’s been there will sympathize. Liberty Belle is by no means free of the old Go-Betweens edge (the brooding “Twin Layers of Lightning” is proof of that), but it is the pervading warmth and rueful humor of this release that make it so accessible and such a delight.

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The Go Betweens – Fountains of Youth (Live at the Town and Country Club) (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:10:06 minutes | 854 MB | Genre: Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Beggars Banquet

What can we say about The Go-Betweens? They were a true treasure and wrote some of the loveliest pop songs you’ll ever hear. They’ve been called “the quintessential cult band of the 80s”…if you know, you know. They were an Australian band co-founded and led by Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, and they released several albums with Beggars Banquet.

Fountains Of Youth (Live at the Town and Country Club) is a previously unreleased live album available digitally for the very first time. About the live album, Uncut said that it’s “a spirited, hitherto unreleased 2LP live set – it provides detailed evidence of the band’s growing confidence and continuously refined songwriting”.

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The Go Betweens – 16 Lovers Lane (Remastered) (1988/2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 37:20 minutes | 463 MB | Genre: Pop Rock, Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Beggars Banquet

Arguably Australia’s greatest pop group ever, The Go-Betweens seemed to save the best for last when they split in 1989. (They reunited in 1999, and have issued two more studio recordings since that time). 16 Lovers Lane is simply breathtaking; it is a deeply moving, aurally sensual collection of songs about relationships and the broken side of love that never lapses into cheap sentimentality or cynicism. Songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan had always been visionary when it came to charting personal and relational melancholy and heartbreak, but here, their resolve focused on charting the depths of the romantic’s soul when it has been disillusioned or crestfallen, is simply and convincingly taut. While it’s true that the group was going through its own version of a soap opera-styled romantic saga, that emotional quagmire seemingly fueled its energies and focus, resulting in an album so texturally rich, lyrically sharp, and musically honest, its effect is nothing less than searing on an any listener who doesn’t have sawdust instead of blood in his or her veins.

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