Grant McLennan

Virtually all of them marvelous, the 18 tunes on Horsebreaker Star make it clear: Grant
McLennan is one of today's best songwriters. McLennan emerged from Australia in the '80s
with the Go-Betweens, and his literate pop early on provoked the Dylan comparisons that
dog nearly any minstrel who has a way with words. He's master equally of the imagistic
chorus ("This is the time, yeah, when the bees don't sting/The pay is cut, rain fal... More >

The pop Go-Between cut his most consistently catchy solo album by getting off the plane in Georgia and recording 30 snapshots of a resigned romantic, every damn one he had, with a producer and musicians he'd never met. The U.S. version borrows one track off the import-only Fireboy while dropping six from the worldwide double-CD, unrolling tune after sweet, simple-seeming tune for 77 minutes. My favorite lines involve, of all things, songs: "Really loved the one about those L.A. freaks/Did it take a day to write or was it weeks?"; runner-up is one of 24 examples of "Lovers living on what went wrong": "You can't find a kidney in Hong Kong." With too many backing vocals, not enough licks, and a rather mild lead singer, the pleasures emerge gradually, mmm by mmm and aha by aha. But play these songs five years from now and every one will be yours. (Grade: A-)