From Amazon.co.uk
The Go-Betweens' last album is by some distance their most polished and accessible. The songs on
16 Lovers Lane are clad in deep layers of multi-tracked acoustic guitar, lavishly decorated with string arrangements and shot through with crisp and clean lead guitars. It's no less than the songs deserve. Grant McLennan comes into his own as a writer of perfect, giddy pop songs ("Love Goes On!", "Was There Anything I Could Do?", and the near-hit "Streets Of Your Town") and Forster grows ever more delightfully mordant: "Love Is A Sign" and "You Can't Say No Forever" both manage the neat trick of finding the funny side of dysfunctional love.
16 Lovers Lane is the parting shot this extraordinary pop group deserved to make--approximately like having the Taj Mahal as a tombstone. It wasn't the billion-seller this extraordinary pop group always deserved to have, but if The Go-Betweens' brilliant career was about anything, it was about hope in spite of it all. We won't see their like again.
--Andrew Mueller
