Albums of the Year # 6 Robert Forster - Inferno

From the wonderful Robert Forster. March:

Being able to listen to a new record by Robert Forster as March arrives is a rare treat. Like an opportunity to catch up with one of your oldest and best friends after years of not seeing them. Forster has a particular gift that differentiates his songwriting from any other musician on earth. A wry and gentle lyricism. Wisdom. A magpie's eye that cherry picks from the records and people that first inspired him, most evidently Dylan and Seventies American Punk and re-melds them according to his own highly idiosyncratic minimalist rule book. Then puts them out as a record when he's ready. But only then.

It was evident to me very quickly on during my first listen early on Friday morning that Forster's new album, Inferno his seventh in all, ( he made nine with the Go-Betweens), was not about to disappoint me. Just seeing the title of the record's opening track Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgement brought a smile to my face before I'd even played it. Dylan, Dylan... But done the Forster way. Dylan in suburbia.

This blog is a much, much humbler endeavour than Forster's life journey but I try to go about it much as I imagine as Forster goes about his songwriting; with an imaginary reader in mind. Meanwhile he seems to write for an imaginary listener. That listener can only be Grant McLennan, his partner and judge and jury for so many over the years with the Go-Betweens before he was so horribly taken away from us in 2006 and most of all, taken from Forster. McLennan is definitely, irrepressibly here.

The Rough Trade Homepage, where Inferno and its background information are listed, does a brilliant job in not mentioning his former band once. Really Forster deserves it of course, he stands in his own place and time as this record more than  attests. A very great talent. One of the most important of all for the likes of me. But really, seeing him utterly apart from his former band is a very difficult thing to do. Frankly almost futile.

The fingerprints of The Go-Betweens are unmistakably all over the record. Fragments of sound, lyrical and melodic twists, a supporting female vocalist who can't help but remind you of Amanda Brown. It's almost like leafing through old photo albums, which is what I've been doing coincidentally over the past few days. Long forgotten memories, moments and emotions come back into view and even though they're experienced through the prism of time assume a strange and frightening clarity. Immediacy.

This is what life is like when you turn fifty. Forster has a few years on me and he's used that time well. Musing on his memories of the chapters of his past and its myriad emotions, loss, disappointment and mercifully joy and sheer love and hunger for life in order to create new art. His records have always been highly evocative of the Australian sunshine and never more so than here. But here they come with the growing realisation of darkness and death. Just look at the record cover. Forster's huge gangling frame stretched on a bed, his arm beckoning out to you.

Forster handles it all with his customary grace. On the front of his memoir Grant & I, Nick Cave describes him as 'the truest and strangest poet of our generation'. It's high but not misplaced praise. That poetry is realised here as so often in the past.  I'm not going to comment on individual songs because I found the record an immersive, snowballing experience, ( ironic, given that it's coming from an Australian).  It gave me the shivers.

Sometimes while I listened to it I was forced to just sit back and reflect. Forster was always and still is the most cerebral and thoughtful of artists. So many echoes of his and his listener's past; the opening to I Want to be Your Dog, ( or is it Waiting for the Man, can't make up my mind), the 'doo doo doos' of Walk on the Wild Side. Moments in the life and career of The Go Betweens, that most unrecognised of bands. McLennan alongside him onstage, in the studio or the rehearsal room, strumming, nodding.

There are nine songs on the record. It's less than thirty five minutes long. It's enough. Forster says what he wants to and is gone. It's funny, it's sad. Songs about the realisation that you're alive but won't be forever. On final track particularly, One Bird in the Sky, one of the very best songs he's ever written, it's unbearably poignant. One of the very finest albums that will be released this year. Already. Sometimes music, like other things in life come at you at the right time, from the right person just when you need it. This is one such record for me. Thank you Robert.