“I’ll bet it sounds like Simon and Garfunkel meets The Smiths,” sneered a friend as I headed deckwards with the cheap looking monochrome sleeve tucked safely under my arm. No way pal Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express, the fourth album from the Go-Betweens is the densest, most challenging and most rewarding work they’ve yet produced.

Given the Jonah-like jinx which surrounds the band’s business dealings – they’ve gone through seven companies, in as many years – it wouldn’t have come as any great surprise were they to have gone for the soft option. A great disappointment to be sure, but even Australians like to eat, albeit, occasionally. Happily, Liberty Belle… sees The Go-Betweens curbing their early tendency towards more obtuse song structures, instead opting for a series of three- to four-minute sketches which offer little more than a nod in the direction of current trends yet, for the most part, remains gloriously commercial.

That the band’s writing team of Grant McLennan and Robert Forster are romantics is never in doubt but with “romantics” of all descriptions crawling from every conceivable crevice in the rock edifice it might be a useful exercise to try to pin them down – in so far as they’ll allow that. Their penchant for short story style scenarios places them roughly in Lloyd Cole territory while the surgical precision of their open heart love songs drags them back to the right of Morrissey’s cataloguing of the traumas and tribulations of the Single Man yet still leaving them to the left of Paddy MacAloon’s more florid confections. So where does that leave The Go-Betweens? On the evidence of Liberty Belle… the answer is firmly on their own turf. ‘Spring Rain’ occupies pole position on the album and serves a not dissimilar function as tone-setter to that of the great ‘Bachelor Kisses’ on ’84’s Springhall Fair. Better get used to those acoustics, folks! ‘The Ghost And The Black Hat’ oddly placed accordion riff immediately throws you off balance while lyrically recalling the early ’70s Australian cinematic qualities of Before Hollywood’s classic ‘Cattle And Cane’.