release date: Jun. 1987
format: vinyl (6042-1-B) / 2 cd (2004 remaster)
[album rate: 4 / 5] [3,78]
producer: Richard Preston
label: Big Time Records - nationality: Australia
Track highlights: 1. "Right Here" - 2. "You Tell Me" - 3. "Someone Else's Wife" - 4. "I Just Get Caught Out" - 5. "Cut It Out" - 7. "Bye Bye Pride" - 8. "Spirit of a Vampyre" - 9. "The Clarke Sisters"
5th studio album by Australian band The Go-Betweens follows a little more than a year after Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express. The album is originally released on Beggars Banquet - the Big Time vinyl issue is an American import, and the 2004 (2 cd) enhanced remaster contains a bonus disc containing 10 extra tracks - mostly alternate ('early') versions [to me sounding like demo takes] and a few previously unreleased compositions.
Before this, the band was officially expanded to a quintet as Amanda Brown was included in the line-up shortly after releasing their '86 album, and the band now consists of the two founding members Grant McLennan on vocals, lead guitar and piano, Robert Forster on vocals and rhythm guitar, staple drummer Lindy Morrison (who has played on all five studio albums), bassist Robert Vickers, who joined the band in '84, and then newest member, multi-instrumentalist Amanda Brown credited on violin, oboe, guitar, keyboards and vocals.
As usual, the cover depicts the band members - here with the three original members: Forster (with his newly-dyed haircut), McLennan and Morrison in the middle flanked by the two newest members: Robert Vickers and Amanda Brown.
The album would prove be the last to feature Vickers, who left the band after this after having played bass on three studio albums. Perhaps he felt uncomfortable at times as not only had Forster and Morrison been a staple couple since '81, and now as they were in the midst of breaking up their relationship, McLennan and Brown initiated their romantic affair as the new couple in the band.
The album may not be their absolute best - it mostly suffers the incoherence between material written by McLennan and Forster, who here seems more out of sync than on any other of the albums, but it's also one of the band's most defining albums with great ideas and songs and as such highly recommendable.
[ allmusic.com 3,5 / 5, Rolling Stone 4 / 5 stars ]
