The Go-Betweens

Musician (10/96, pp. 83-84) - "...It's by no means a stretch...to call Australia's Go-Betweens the bery best rock 'n' roll band of the '80s....
combining tension with beauty, happiness with regret, and love with anger..."
Melody Maker (4/13/96, p.39) - "...For every song you have to make an emotional investment. The Go-Betweens aren't easy or obvious. Their world is full of of despairing, melancholy people..."
New Musical Express (4/13/96, p.47) - 8 (out of 10) - "...[a] blatant pop sheen....By this point Amanda Brown had joined, adding oboe solos...and youthful enthusiasm..."

They stick to what they know, and their knowledge increases. The quartet's a quintet now, up one violin, which may not seem like much but does serve to reinforce the hooks that have never been a strength of their understated, ever more explicit tales from the bourgeois fringe. So though I was pulled in by "The Clarke Sisters"--"They sleep in the back of a feminist bookstore"--I soon got involved with every song on the album, with a special rush for "Right Here," where Robert Forster or Grant McLennan, I still have trouble telling them apart, stands by his woman. (Grade - A)