It's New to Me: Oceans Apart by the Go-Betweens (2005)

Detail of a photo titled "New Trier High School" by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1950

It seems like I've written too many times about the Go-Betweens, Australia's best band ever (sorry INXS!), on this blog. But I just bought another Go-Betweens record, and I'm going to write about it, damnit! So bear with me. After a run of excellent albums in the '80s, the Go-Betweens broke up, and its two principle songwriters, Grant McLennan and Robert Forster, each had decent solo careers. They decided to start working together again under the Go-Betweens name in 2000 and recorded three "post-hiatus" records. Oceans Apart is the last of these records, released in 2005, just a year before Grant McLennan's passing.

Oceans Apart got mixed reactions when it came out, but I get the sense that it is gaining stature in the Go-Betweens discography - a lot of people now say that it is the best album from the band's second run. I had heard about the album's mastering problems (which are probably responsible for some of the negative reactions it got when it came out), but they still really bothered me on first listen. I read somewhere that the mastering issues had been corrected since the initial release, but the CD I'm listening to doesn't sound good. It is mastered very VERY LOUD. Which is an odd choice because (a) these songs don't really call for such a harsh and aggressive sound, and (b) some of the album's best songs suffer from bad distortion because they have been mastered so "hot".

Once I got past the sound issues and started to get acquainted with the songs themselves, I was really impressed. When Forster and McLennan got back together, they were really two solo artists putting songs on albums together, but Oceans Apart sounds like them coming together as a band again. The songs have a collaborative feel and high quality that comes from friendly competition - McLennan's delicate "Lavender" and Forster's evocative "Darlinghurst Nights" are among the best things they've written in their careers. One of my favorite songs on the record is Forster's "Born to a Family", which has a light-hearted pop feel that people usually associate with McLennan's songs. That Forster could pull it off so perfectly shows that the band's two songwriters had learned some important lessons from each other. I don't love Oceans Apart as much as 16 Lovers Lane, the band's last "pre-hiatus" album, but I'm starting to appreciate it as a culmination of the two friends' maturation and songwriting prowess.

I strongly recommend Oceans Apart to fans of good songwriter-pop (not a real genre, but whatever), but if you're going to buy it, it might be worthwhile to do a little research on the album's mastering issues to see if you can find a version that sounds better than the one I got.

"Born to a Family" by the Go-Betweens