THE GO-BETWEENS
Bright Yellow Bright Orange

BUJU BANTON
Friends for Life

DECADE AGO, Evan Dando was pretty much the perfect pop star. He was a tousle-haired, scatterbrained blond who posed for teen magazines with his top off, a tabloid-friendly party animal with heaps of famous friends and a hard-drug habit he didn’t mind discussing, and a singer/songwriter who wrote hummable tunes with hilarious lyrics. OK, he didn’t have many hits, and his band, the Lemonheads, never made a classic album, but for a couple of years back there Dando was so cool that no one cared.

Perfect pin-ups don’t last long, however, and by the release of the Lemonheads’ last album in 1996, Car Button Cloth, Dando was a drug casualty whose heyday was almost over. The band split after a farewell performance at Reading in 1997 and almost nothing was heard of the lead Lemonhead for the rest of the decade.

Now married and in his mid-thirties, the Boston-born, New York-based Dando has had one foot on the comeback track for a while. First, there was an acoustic tour of tiny venues, then the low-key release of a live album recorded in Massachusetts and an EP of country covers.

Dando has purposely avoided the pop scene — he played the London Fleadh in 2001 and, when he toured here last year, didn’t advertise a single show. Nevertheless, every venue sold out, proving that fans still have a soft spot for the boy who once wrote a really sweet song about snot.

Those who turned up to the shows already know what to expect from Baby I’m Bored (Setanta), Dando’s solo debut. On the one hand, it’s a disappointingly lo-fi collection of tracks that could have been made in a shed. At times you can’t even hear what Dando is singing, which is a shame because he writes a mean rhyme. But Baby I’m Bored is also rather lovely, if you’re in the right mood. It’s full of quirky songs about relationships gone wrong — and a couple gone right — recorded with odd percussion instruments and slightly grungy guitars.

And while the likes of the album opener Repeat and the handclap-backed Waking Up do sound like a few friends jamming, the more melancholy, multitracked Rancho Santa Fe and the messy rock song The Same Thing are surprisingly substantial.

Fortunately, Dando hasn’t stopped taking a sideways look at life’s little ups and downs — on My Idea he asks a girlfriend who ditched him to tell mutual friends that it was he who ended the affair — and he still knows a good melody when he hears one. Lemonheads fans will be best pleased with the gentle, folky All My Life and Why Do You Do This to Yourself?, but probably as perplexed as everyone else with the album closer In the Grass All Wine Coloured, which simply repeats the title over and over. Well, Dando always was an odd one.

Australia’s Go-Betweens could talk to Dando all night about the merits of not changing your music to appeal to the masses. The co-singer/songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan released six albums in the 1980s that were showered with praise but sold only a handful. Still, they stuck to their guns and in 2000 came back after a decade-long gap with The Friends of Rachel Worth, another set of catchy folk-pop songs that sounded like Lou Reed’s best solo stuff, but with a sunnier disposition.

The follow-up, Bright Yellow Bright Orange (Circus), is along the same lines — apparently effortless, deceptively simple pop songs laced with smart, observational lyrics about love and life. The album opener Caroline and I, in which Forster compares his humdrum days to the life of Princess Caroline of Monaco, is an instant classic — in fact, the Princess liked it so much that she wrote to tell him.

Elsewhere, there’s the spectre of Bob Dylan on Too Much of One Thing and some melancholy, romantic songs that never descend into slush. Come to think of it, Bright Yellow Bright Orange is the sort of polished folk-pop Dando should be making. Quick, someone send him a copy.

On Friends for Life (Anti, Inc) Buju Banton sounds as if he has been taking tips from dancehall’s newest star Sean Paul. Banton, aka Mark Anthony Myrie, has been a dancehall icon himself for a decade, so to keep up with the young pups there is a distinctly urban edge to some of the 19 songs on his new album.

The opening track, Paid Not Played, mixes dancehall with hip hop and was produced by Troy Rami, the man behind Sean Paul’s crossover pop hit Gimme the Light. Later, the rapper Fat Joe crops up alongside Beres Hammond on Good Times and there is a modern R&B feel to both the title track and Damn. Mostly, the mix does work — thanks to his trademark gruff vocal style Banton could be the Busta Rhymes of reggae — but the star still sounds more comfortable with traditional tunes such as Get It On, featuring Wayne Wonder, a cover of Peter Tosh’s Mama Africa and the magnificent, equal-rights anthem Up Ye Mighty Race.

Friends for Life, however, is a wise commercial move — it will keep Banton in touch with a generation just discovering reggae, while there is plenty here (ska, lovers rock and church tunes included) to please his old fans.

See, sometimes it does pay to change, just not too much.