Grant McLennan
+++++++++++[ - - - "In Your Bright Ray" - - - ]++B E G G A R ' S+B A N Q U E T

In the '70s, it seemed like sooner or later, every rock star (and especially every singer-songwriter) wound up singing about finding some rustic retreat where you could mellow out making love in front of a stone fireplace or on a big cushy bed. (If you've forgotten what I'm talking about, drag out "Honky Chateau" and listen to "Mellow.") I'm not quite sure how Grant McLennan gets away with singing "In the house, the smell of tulips and peppermint/Cotton sheets, candles smoking ... making love, making waves and not making sense" on "One Plus One" on his new album "In Your Bright Ray," but he does. Maybe because throughout his work with the Go-Betweens and his solo career ("In Your Bright Ray" is his fourth album), he's always known the difference between introspection and insulation. The lyrics that follow the ones quoted above, "Everyone's done what everyone's said/Sure seems like we went and lost our heads," suggests how retreat can leave you stranded and how things do not always add up to the expected result. The song is called "One Plus One," and as Godard knew, that does not necessarily equal two.

It's hard to know exactly how to characterize Grant McLennan. Rock critic Robert Christgau once nailed the Go-Betweens' sound by describing it as "rock 'n' roll chamber music." He occupies a space between the pop craftsman and the more personal approach of singer-songwriters. His work isn't overtly confessional (his story lines are often oblique), but it is idiosyncratic. Of the Go-Betweens' two songwriters, McLennan played the more melodic hook-conscious foil to Robert Forster's gloomy (and on occasion near-gothic) wordiness. That facility sprang full-bloom on 1994's "Horsebreaker Star," an album of 18 tracks (24 on the U.K. edition), one beautifully crafted song after another.

"In Your Bright Ray" starts out as melodic and as immediately accessible as its predecessor. McLennan writes the sort of hooks that you discover as the songs go on. And he's stretching here, trying to let the music do the talking. You can hear that on the nearly ominous, nearly wordless closing track, "The Parade of Shadows," with its layers of echoey guitars and McLennan repeating, "See them, see them ..." And you can especially hear the music's new weight on "Malibu 69," perhaps the record's best track, where McLennan jumps from California to Vietnam, from acid casualties to soldiers in a trench who might be casualities, ending each verse with the benediction, "They're gonna be all right/they'll be all right." It's as if he's taking in the wreckage of that decade and saying it was all worth it. The real story, though, is the music that builds and swells behind McLennan, gaining mass and density and weight as it does. I'm not sure it's in the league with any of Neil Young's elegies for the '60s, but I think he'd be proud to plug in and wail away on a few verses.

McLennan moves away from the predominantly country flavor of "Horsebreaker Star" and into new realms (for him) of hard rock and psychedelia. The rewards and disappointments and compromises of love are still McLennan's subjects, executed on cuts like "Comet Baby," and "Do You See the Lights?" with a near-flawless pop instinct. Where "In Your Bright Ray" goes wrong is when McLennan ventures too near his mystical/quasi-medieval tale-telling or makes his influences too obvious. When he sings "There's a juggler in the street sellin' suicide," you know the street he's on is "Desolation Row."

Those of us who loved the Go-Betweens (and if you haven't heard them, you need to stop reading this and go out and get "Tallulah" and "16 Lovers Lane" right now) did so because the music they made was gorgeous and romantic and, under hard scrutiny, tough-minded. They were romantics without any gush in them. Flaws and all, "In Your Bright Ray" is about McLennan's career-long determination to make music that's both soothing and hard-headed. This is something you can put on when you want some quiet time without feeling like you're letting your brain turn to mush, because the music rejects emotional retreat as a strategy for either art or life. If the 30-somethings who've given up on new rock and roll apart from the performers they remember from 10 years ago tried McLennan (or Amy Rigby or Freedy Johnston or Aimee Mann) they might find something contemporary to their taste. At the very least, they might for an hour or so even feel hip.
SALON | Oct. 10, 1997

Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.