Go-Betweens – Bright Yellow Bright Orange
Classic Australian band the Go-Betweens have never sounded so classic, so Australian and so, well, Go-Betweens as they do now. By the time Robert Forster and Grant McLennan regrouped in 1999, sans longtime drummer Lindy Morrison, the Go-Betweens had become a byword for a certain indie-pop romanticism. The band was canonized during their eleven-year hiatus in the mid-1980s by a generation of followers such as Belle & Sebastian, Pavement and Teenage Fanclub.
Their 2000 “comeback” album, The Friends Of Rachel Worth, evidenced the newfound vitality of the McLennan/Forster partnership, and Bright Yellow Bright Orange confirms the simple fact that no-one “does” the Go-Betweens like the Go-Betweens themselves.
The beauty of it all is that the elements which make up the Go-Betweens’ “trademark” sound — the tension and transcendence of interplaying guitars, the depth and intelligence of both songwriters’ vision, the dreamlike prettiness of their melodic turns — cannot be reduced to mere formulae. These elements are points of origin, so that what originates is familiar without being predictable, consistent without being staid or nostalgic.
Bright Yellow Bright Orange opens with the sparkling “Caroline And I”, a devotional to Princess Caroline of Monaco that affectionately echoes the Go-Betweens’ first single, “Lee Remick”. The album title evokes the quality that makes the Go-Betweens sound so definitively Australian — the bright glare of subtropical sunshine that colors their music, lending a heady shimmer to countrified janglers such as “Too Much Of One Thing”. Incidentally, the title also returns to a Go-Betweens tradition of double-L words in their album titles, like a friendly reassurance of their constancy to their legion of true-believer fans.