Second firsts

The Go-Betweens return

by Franklin Bruno

When French New Wave gadfly Jean-Luc Godard returned to narrative filmmaking in 1979 after a decade-long hiatus, he told an interviewer, "It's very seldom that you have the opportunity to make your first film for the second time." In music, comebacks and reunions are far more commonplace. But some second acts are more welcome, and more surprising, than others. The Go-Betweens, who return to active duty with the new The Friends of Rachel Worth (Jetset), are ahead on both counts. "Welcome" because, during their mid-'80s peak, they released a string of albums (Before Hollywood, Liberty Belle, and The Black Diamond Express) that are as tense and vivid as any guitar pop had been before or has been since. "Surprising" because, when founders Robert Forster and Grant McLennan dissolved the group after 1990's gauzy 16 Lovers Lane, they did so amid a tangle of intra-band intrigue and unmet commercial expectations. The four solo albums the pair have made since have had their virtues, but rarely has either matched the level of their work together.

Despite this back story, the birth pangs of the new album were fairly gentle. "It's not like we hadn't been in contact with each other in the intervening years," explains McLennan. "We did an acoustic tour last year because Beggars Banquet had done the best-of [Bellavista Terrace]. We were playing some new songs on the tour, and about three weeks into it, I just said to Robert, 'Why don't we make another record?' And he said, 'I agree.' "

Once Forster began announcing their plans between songs on the tour, the question of who to work with, and where, soon solved itself. "We were in San Francisco, and Sleater Kinney had come to the show. We knew Dig Me Out, and when they came backstage, [Quasi and Sleater-Kinney drummer] Janet Weiss said, 'If you make a record, I'm your drummer.' "

Engineered in Portland, Oregon, by Tape Op magazine editor Larry Crane, The Friends of Rachel Worth finds Forster and McLennan joined not only by Weiss but by her various bandmates: Quasi's Sam Coomes on keyboards and Sleater Kinney's Carrie Brownstein and Corrine Tucker, who contribute guitar and backing vocals to selected songs. The connection between two Brisbane-bred fortysomething songwriters and a fierce American band often reduced (unfairly) to their riot grrrl roots may seem dim, but Forster had his suspicions. "I hate claiming any kind of influence, but when I first heard Dig Me Out, I heard faint, faint little echoes of Before Hollywood, and I thought, 'That just can't be. These young women from Portland are not even going to have heard of the Go-Betweens.' But when we met them, they mentioned that record, and they mentioned Television, and it was amazing that this hunch I had turned out to be true."

Brownstein's guitar work forms the closest link: her lead break in "Going Blind" wouldn't be out of place in one of her own band's mid-tempo numbers, but it could just as easily have been lifted from a McLennan Go-Betweens solo circa 1985. And both bands toy with gender and persona -- Forster used to annoy record executives by playing high-profile shows in a housedress, and the schizophrenia of the new album's "He Lives My Life" has its parallel in Tucker's "Male Model" ("He talks to me in my sleep/Does he write my songs for me?"). As for Weiss, she sounds more like original Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison on Sleater Kinney's All Hands on the Bad One than she does here, where her smoother timekeeping conforms to the acoustic textures of "Magic in Here" and "Spirit." (The major exception is "German Farmhouse," as close to an out-and-out rave-up as anything the Go-Betweens have recorded.)

The songs benefit from the most sympathetic backing Forster and McLennan have had in years, but what makes The Friends of Rachel Worth is the pair's considerable chemistry. Largely written for now-abandoned solo albums, McLennan's songs have grown more formal over time and Forster's more elliptical, but they bounce off each other in surprising ways -- the chilly view from the shore of McLennan's "Orpheus Beach" ("My swollen eye at Sunday School/No savior here beneath God's bright rule") stands in stark yet pleasant contrast to Forster's Jonathan Richman-ish reminiscences about "Surfing Magazines." The Friends of Rachel Worth may not be the best or even the most ambitious recording to bear the Go-Betweens name. But as second first albums go, it's less an interruption in two solo careers than a firm initial step toward re-establishing the formidable group identity Forster and McLennan forged more than a decade ago.