(Mushroom, 1988)Based on what little Go-Betweens I’ve heard in my life, I’m something of a prickish heretic in my bored dismissal of the group. And maybe such dismissal is unfair of me, especially since this 7” is from the last album they released before breaking up (for the first time), and by that time they’d already had about a full decade in which to get lousy. So can the legions of fankids tell me whether “Was There Anything I Could Do” is representative or not? O please lemme know, dear people. Because what I hear is sad-guy acoustic strummery done in a fashion speedy, with big-cheese string-sawin’ choruses, and an awful fiddle solo dropped into the middle… all with production values sleek enough to make dud Aussie-buds the Church drool. Yeecch. B-side “Rock and Roll Friend” isn’t on the album (16 Lovers Lane), but it IS on my stereo right now, and I wish it’d get right the dickens off and take its midtempo, 1980s-CMJ-for-crybabies stylings with it. Boo! Boo to this record! Back into the box you go!
1 comment:
OK, I gotta say: what the hell were you doing in 1988, chief? Bein' about 8 years old or so, what do you know about the reasons why, when every 60s giant has turned dreckish (including my man Bobby and thine man Paulie), and most others have embraced funkadelic oooohings via keyboard glitz a la Prince or Madonna or whatever crotch-grinding media spectacle of your choice, and anything approaching punkish new wave was still underwraps (for most of us) up there in the yet-to-be fabled Seattle, and even the brashy crankings that were the 'Mats and Husker Du were becoming domestic housepets, and frigging R.E.M. was pumping arenas with "Stand" and elsewhere teen white boys with dropped trousers longed to rap -- SOME might prefer a bit of melancholic strumming and the nostalgic tatters of something folky and lyrical ("Wrong Road"; "Dive for Your Memory; "The House Jack Kerouac Built"; "Bye Bye Pride")? I'm assuming those fankids of which you speak are the ones who know that this type of thing is precursor to so many emo-strummers and navel-gazers of the current climate. But, even if so, the Go-Between understood a hook, as attenuated as that pop staple had become in those dark, dark days ere the Wall fell...
Me, well, I revisit this era at my peril...
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