Forty years after the hunt began, Robert Forster has found what he coveted, right in his front parlor. “That striped sunlight sound” he’s called it—as thin, keen, bright, and warm as the Brisbane summers he and his band the Go-Betweens pined for when touring the world, often for terrible paydays and negligible sales incommensurate with their euphoric reviews. For his eighth solo release, The Candle and the Flame, Forster has recorded a hangout album—with the people he actually hangs out with. The songs sound as fresh as morning air through open kitchen windows.
COVID-era exigencies and health emergencies shaped the material. Shaken by wife Karin Bãumler’s diagnosis of ovarian cancer in July 2021, Forster wrote “She’s a Fighter” as she endured chemo: a two-line ditty with vigorous strumming, an acerbic five-note electric fill, and light marimba accents. Rarely has he allowed rhythmic vigor to signify by itself. Intimates back him: Former Go-Between Adele Pickvance; his son Louis of the gawky indie rock band the Goon Sax, on bass and guitar; daughter Loretta on second guitar. Bãumler even joined on xylophone and ba-da-da backup vocals. To make claims for The Candle and the Flame as a Major Statement belittles what the Forster family endured—as if he had Major Statements in mind. They play as if willing Bãumler to fight.
This Robert Forster sounds less complacent than confident. Devotees know their man; he can afford to apotheosize himself with his nasal, abashed, slightly mournful vocal timbre. “I Don’t Do Drugs I Do Time” confirms his knack for marrying an eyebrow-raising title and a conceit so obvious that of course no one thought of it before he did. Time fascinates him, and time will not relent. “Feel changes in my mind/I’m walkin’ to school in ‘69/The next day I’m 35,” he sings over a couple chords. A nod toward George Jones, “Tender Years” registers how an inward eye turns outward, with Bãumler as the subject: “Walking through salt and water, I see how far we’ve come.” Louis’ bass grounds the sentiment with a riff as inevitable as a hug. The Forster who as a Go-Between commemorated the early days of married seclusion and flipped through a notebook of familiar-names-now-memories has long understood how love can be a byproduct of curiosity.
If The Candle and the Flame follows the Forsterian pattern of skeletal albums preceding a fuller, thicker-bodied one, it stands out because simpatico players have kicked around and toughened up the fuller, thicker-bodied ruminations. Forster finds resonances in the everyday. He knows, per “The Roads,” that the colors of the country are green and brown and red. Think before you speak, he offers in “It’s Only Poison,” and speak before you’re forgotten. Far from stifling the imagination, these descendants of what he praised in an earlier song as a family of “honest workers” have kindled it. The Candle and the Flame is an entrancing flicker.
