Bachelor Kisses is a mid-'80s commercial sound but its warmth is not bland nor of the sugary pop of the charts of the time. The chorus has a cheekily inserted bar of 2/4 which makes it sound out of time, especially in a chorus. You hear it first and think it's a glitch but there it goes again in the repeat. The gentle arpeggiated chords and smooth synthesiser of the introduction lead us to think of anything from the time but there's a heart to it that remains uncommon. Oddly enough, when I first heard this on radio it wasn't pre-announced. I thought it was New Order. I can imagine the New Order of Low Life covering this without remark to this day. For me, that makes it all the more sumptuous.
Five Words starts stridently out of the gate with big bright guitars. Robert Forster's vocal is declarative and almost at odds with the smoothness of the folky guitar splash of the arrangement. Is it about a birth to death of a Catholic and a renunciation by someone who is leaving the fold? Don't know, it's like finding an old photo with a caption only partially legible on the back.
By The Old Way Out I notice a slickness in the rhythm section that wasn't there in Send Me a Lullaby and Before Hollywood. I don't mean tight, I mean slick. It sounds played for real but that at some point there was a click track that everyone had to put up with. This is the first track that sounds more manufactured. There is a glam rock football chant to the chorus, especially at the iteration when it's vocals to a tom tom pattern. That said, it doesn't jar at this point, it's just noticeable.
You've Never Lived has more of an older band chord crunch. Forster's vocals are more emphatic than in Five Words. I'm no lyric maestro as far as interpretation goes but the sense of a series of flaws and breaks in communication seem to be flowing here as though something that has ended has done so in confusion. For a song so concerned with a lack of order there is a surprisingly conventional guitar solo, the type of which this band (along with every other post-punk outfit) would have rejected very shortly before.
Part Company begins with a guitar figure that sounds like we've interrupted it half way through something. Then over a signature guitar swell, Forster sings a kind of personal autopsy report for a deceased intimacy, the repetition of the title phrase coming back like a difficult truth knocking at any ideas of smoothing out the rough thoughts. Is there a theremin in there toward the end? If so, nice use.
Slow Slow Music begins with a bass funk riff, joined by a skittish funk guitar figure. McLennan comes in in full voice, yelling across the room, hammering a single note until the ends of the lines. The tension loosens for the chorus. three verses and choruses about chaos at the end of a relationship and the comfort of music.
A leisurely guitar figure starts my favourite track of the set, Draining the Pool for You. A disastrous relationship told in images of decadence or even film noir stories. A double stopped solo and the vocal melody both hark back to my all time GoBs favourite, Stop Before You Say It. Gorgeous.
River of Money begins as a soundtracky band with a distorted tremolo guitar that might remind you of a live track or the bit in a Doors song when ... Ah, McLennan is talking over it, narrating a tale of a relationship escape as told by the one left behind. A gated drum slams, changing only with the more obsessive passage of recalled promises. Even more noir than Draining the Pool.
Unkind and Unwise begins as a solid guitar groove. McLennan's smooth vocal. As in a few tracks, here, vocals sung by the main vocalist overlap in pre-chorus moments (here, also, panned extremely) as though the singer's thoughts are manifesting. A short and pleasant one.
Man O' Land to Girl O' Sea is a brisker guitar rocker. Forster's exasperated vocal tells of a breakup spinning out of control. A calming few guitar chords in the middle lead to another guitar solo, expressive and minimal, unlike the one previously mentioned. It goes longer than you'd expect but is dramatic rather than indulgent. The final choruses and verses are more fraught as the song heads to a fadeout.
I wonder how much of the meh this album generates among fans is due to the troubles of its production. The producer they'd worked with on Before Hollywood approached this one with a honed pop sensibility. He used click tracks and then gated the played drums until they sound audibly compressed. The times were not good for individualistic expression as they had been in the five or so years of post punk leading up. Guitar bands were increasingly treated by producers as substitute synth pop cuties and things that were better a little loose in any kind of rock like drums became strict and regimented; perfect timing and heavily controlled tones.
This is not to say that the gated drums or mainstream guitar solos make this a bad album. First, I don't think it is a bad album. It is made up of songs decent to durable and well performed. Second, the playing is good when it warms up and that's in every song. The tales of stress, ill feeling and resentment after the producer gave the band a sense of being bound. I know a lot of the stories about the recording of the White Album and most of them are ugly or sour but when I put it on as I still do regularly, I only hear music that pleases me.
Some of the songs here feel as oppressive as their subject matter but so do Your Turn My Turn or Stop Before You Say It. If it means they made an album that was meant to turn them into something they were not then this bold sounding LP also brought them closer to the edge of the stage. Am I bothered by the gated snares? Not really. That aspect to rock music which followed a fashion that was always going to feel dated is also audible in Echo and the Bunnymen's last great album (Ocean Rain) as well as R.E.M. unfairly under represented second album Reckoning. Producers wouldn't take that off the agenda until well after Spring Hill Fair came out. It was gone from the Go-Betweens by the next album. It's more of a time capsule than anything now and, at its worst, represents a moment when the band tried on an aesthetic costume that didn't quite fit. They still had the songs and would have many more.
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