Written by: Dave Cantrell
With this review I inch to within a dozen away from hitting my thousandth for Stereo Embers and here’s the funny thing: before linking up with Alex here at SEM I was not infrequently asked why, considering all the writing I was doing – yes, there’s a novel and several short stories sitting around here on some drive or another – and given my obvious obsessive interest in music, don’t I write about it? My stock reply then was rather blunt: I felt I was too close to it, that I’d not ever be able to honestly convey the impact it’s had on me in the way and to the degree it has and, well, to an extent I still feel that’s true, especially when faced with the prospect of covering the latest album from an artist whose work is so deeply enmeshed in that pretty much lifelong, marrow-like core of emotion and psyche as Robert Forster is and, without exaggeration, has been since emerging from Down Under with his late writing partner Grant McLennan (and one must mention drummer Lindy Morrison, bassist Robert Vickers and the poly-talented Amanda Brown on violin and other assorteds) smack in the middle of the original post-punk wave which is to say 1978.
For those that need a refresher – or, God forfend, an introduction – that emergence, in Brisbane, came in the form of the newly-formed Go-Betweens, a match made in whatever heaven is responsible for creating the prospect of pop/indie/whateveer music reaching, pretty much immediately, the apex of that ever-elusive but centrally necessarty quality of all the finest rock- and ballad-based songcraft which for our purposes here we’ll define as a ‘brilliantly real – and brilliantly realized – mix of joy-tinged melancholy’ (an odd turn of phrase perhaps but if you know the Go-Betweens you know what we mean) resulting in material that simply could not sound more effortlessly human. There was, in short, something immediately riveting in their work which is perhaps all the more extraordinary given the sturdy lack of that era’s preferred power dynamics, no Hookian bass, no dour pronouncements of socio-political decline/existential angst, not even any synths per se. Nope, just narratives carved from the heart set inside arrangements fashioned from the same which, one cannot but admit, is the soundest of sound practices which, naturally (and naturalistically), Forster has forever followed, always building on that truest of legacies and to be honest we could stop right here and you’d have all you need to drop what you’re doing and buy this record (just released May 23rd on the world’s most consistent label Tapete) and buy it now, without hesitation, as you will not find nor hear an album this suffused with the sublime valedictorian air that speaks this innately and with such guiding assurance – and, it should be quickly noted, that often resilient joy noted above, especially on the, yes, delicious, bucolic title track, a loving and lovely duet with wife Karin Bäumler – to the tenor of our times as this one.
Coming at us out of the gate with an instant momentum which I’ll choose to call a ‘warm adrenaline rush,’ opening track “Tell It Back to Me,” with a disarming display of effortlessness, takes a loving swing at you straightaway, engaging beyond measure – no exaggeration, just the truth – and I gotta tell you, as an example, the (yes, Dylanesque) harmonica in the second measure of each instrumental break by itself shatters any and all reservations anyone might have (for whatever unthinkable reason) regarding the timeless merits on offer here and that’s not to mention the song’s unbreakable classicism but then again who’s surprised given who we’re talking about here. Which has always been the case with Forster’s work but what I’m only now realizing is the songs, universal as they are, strong as they’ve plainly always been, are in essence spells one falls under while listening to them, a claim made plain here eight times over.
Take, as an example, the next-up “Good to Cry.” Smoothly accelerative from the jump, again with a pop classicism that one could easily believe, not least due the chorus’s almost coy background singers, was born in Nashville before moving via Brisbane to Stockholm (where the album was recorded), the song is essentially nothing less that a two-and-a-half minute hook before “Breakfast on the Train” comes down the sweet yet pensive, um, track that, in its near eight-minute length, amounts with a striking spare clarity, to nothing less than a short story soundtracked by an acoustic-centered arrangement that to these ears tacks more toward Iberian than Australasia but in any case proves a brilliant anchor of sorts to this brilliant record. Probably that’s enough to convince even the most skeptical reader of the assets at hand but allow us to throw a couple more cuts your way.
Album highlight “Such A Shame” (in this listener’s view, of course, and just as ‘of course,’ choosing a ‘highlight’ here is a bit of a fool’s errand as it’s always been with this artist), confessional, gently – if powerfully – poignant and not a little personally resonant – especially in the song’s coda as Forster, in a voice as quieted as bold, with only the loneliness of a piano sounding in the air, sing-speaks “you’re back in the city, I’m not an urban guy / I thought I was because I can’t remember why” rather strikes a chord with this forever city-lover now retired to smalltown life in Northern California – and, well, that’s the deal with our Mr. Forster and has always been, his songs have the habit of getting under your skin and, well, staying there as if that’s where they belong and, well, as a matter of fact, they do. Then, a couple tracks later comes the powerful closer “Diamonds,” a love song of appreciation and gratitude that, in its somewhat startling sways from the relatively pastoral to sudden interludes of cathartic release, intimates the often lurching flow of not just love but life itself, the result – no surprise – a masterclass in the bouyant and ever-pliant potential inherent in the pursuit of vibrant, genuinely vibrant songcraft.
While the word ‘satisfying’ is a tad wan when held up to the the plaudits just awarded in the prose above, the fact is it’s also a damnably rare quality insofar as songwriting in concerned, especially when one tries to cite how many albums one’s walked away from feeling fully satisfied by what they’ve just heard straight through from first note to last. That being indisputably the case with Strawberries, allow us to say, humbly but with force, “Here’s one.”
[and, quick but exceedingly necessary credits to producer Peter Morén, who you very well might know from Peter, Björn and John, Jonas Thorell on bass, drummer Magnus Olsson with crucial assists from Lina Langendorf’s woodwinds work and keyboardist Anna Ahman]
