By 1994 the hits that had eluded Grant McLennan would remain mythical unless he switched methods; he switched them and still got no hits. Credit Beggars Banquet, home to Peter Murphy, for giving the former Go-Betweens singer-songwriter-guitarist the thumbs-up to release a double album produced by R.E.M. engineer John Keane in the Deep South. No one, to quote a sage, is to blame. 1994-1995 saw a resurgence ofdesperate chiming guitar popin the top forty, thanks to the Gin Blossoms, Toad the Wet Sprocket (heard “Fall Down”recently? It works), and, to a mushier extent, Goo Goo Dolls. Blessed with a talent for breathing melodies that guitarists caught like pollen, McLennan was no blander a vocalist than, say, Johnny Rzeznik. But the Goo Goo Dolls leader got hits being strummy strummy strummy while McLennan got a mention in SPIN’s January ’96 list of the Best Records You Didn’t Hear or some shit. “I didn’t know someone could be so lonesome,” he sang in another life.
And the album celebrated here? Apart from the oddity of dropping several tracks for its U.S. release and inserting Fireboy‘s admittedly killer “Lighting Fires,” it boasts the consistency of a songwriter whose tunefulness could be unerring enough to induce a coma. I mean, facts are facts: beautiful melodies are nice, but not even Keane’s punchy mix and Syd Straw’s excellent harmonies can warm the marmoreal textures of McLennan’s songs. For better or worse, he got complacent after 1988; his erstwhile partner Robert Forster took advantage of his melodic inconsistency and often not wry enough talk-singing to experiment a little. “Beyond its fallacy of scale, the standard Lennon/McCartney = Forster/McLennan equation ignores the inconvenient fact that neither Go-Between could outsing George Harrison in the shower,” noted Go-Betweens fan Robert Christgau remarked in an otherwise laudatory 1995 review.
OK, fine — fuck me. Horsebreaker Star is a marvel. After “Simone & Perry” stops auditioning to be the bumper for Party of Five, it sets up a character-driven song cycle as sparkling as a Grant Hart album. I find McLennan a sexier motherfucker than many readers, I imagine, and I credit the breathy burr in “Put You Down,” on which he and Straw do a little Neil-Emmylou call-and-response that lights up my dendrites. He gets off on American slang like “Do Your Own Thing,” on playing Byrds records. Those familiar arpeggios, leaned on too often in his solo career, complement the rhetorical chorus of “Ice in Heaven.” He titles a jangly popper “If I Was a Girl. Even the mild wordplay in tracks like “Dropping You” — the eye and ear expect the worn trope “Losing You” — relies on a chord change that catches me unawares or a lyric that on fourth listen sounds lazy and on tenth is marvelous in its simplicity (“You can change your sex, change your name/But this old world remains the same/I don’t mind, it still looks good”).
Finally — the title track. Another strummy opening, a shimmer of foreboding, graced with a corker of an electric solo; I can always tell when McLennan plays an electric solo. It presaged a reunion, a glorious one, with his former partner a few years later.
Meh
Girl in a Beret
Race Day Rag
Sound, Solid
Simone and Perry
Ice in Heaven
Do Your Own Thing
Keep My Word
Open My Eyes
That’s That
If I Was a Girl
All Her Songs
Ballad of Easy Rider
Late Afternoon in Early August
Good to Great
Put You Down
Horsebreaker Star
Coming Up For Air
Open Invitation
Lighting Fires
What Went Wrong
From My Lips
Don’t You Cry For Me No More
No Peace in My Palace
Head Over Heels
Dropping You
Humanizing The Vacuum 