Album: The Go-Betweens

Bright Yellow Bright Orange, Circus/Universal

Back in the 1980s, antipodean combo The Go-Betweens established a reputation for unassuming, quietly magical guitar-pop which, in retrospect, can be regarded as breaking the ground for such as Travis and Teenage Fanclub. Perhaps it was too unassuming: when albums such as Spring Hill Fair and Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express scored rave reviews but meagre sales, the band grew disillusioned and eventually dissolved, songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLellan going off to pursue solo careers through the Nineties, with no greater commercial success. Having regrouped,their style now sounds more in keeping with contemporary indie-pop, with neatly-turned vocal harmonies, modest guitar interplay and, on songs like "Make Her Day", the kind of super-logical chord sequences that seem to have existed for ever. Understandably, some songs bear the scars of unrewarded toil, and there's an air of uncertainty hanging over the album as a whole. "In my life nothing is planned/ You might think you see purpose/ When what you're seeing is a band," they sing in "Too Much of One Thing", fretting over dissipation, while "Something for Myself" finds the protagonist "Trapped within an image, unable to move/ Want to get out of Folk, and get into Rare Groove", going on to consider whether transgressive choice is a requirement for self-definition. But it's not all autobiographical; "Mrs Morgan" is a wistful portrait of a mysterious outsider, while the best track, "In Her Diary", muses upon the imperfection of memory, the gap between diaries and realities.