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Crowded House - Crowded House

Crowded House
Crowded House

Rarely has any modern music sounded so cheerful and so creepy as some of the off-center love songs that pop out of the red head of Neil Finn. This young New Zealander may be remembered as a key member of Split Enz, for which he penned such hits as the classic romantic paranoid's delight "I Got You." With that group officially dispersed, he's now the head of the Crowded household, and on his new group's debut album the mood is looser and brighter, but the modus operandi is still to mix up the peppy and the panicky. It's great, nervous pop.

Part of that fetching paradox lies in Finn's distinctive melodies – filled with irresistible borderline-bubblegum chord progressions
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that often descend just at the point in the chorus where you'd figure they ought to be ascending – and part of it is tied to the mixed messages his love songs send out. For Finn is the worst kind of true romantic: the honest kind. In "Love You 'til the Day I Die," the album's most impassioned serenade, he's so upfront with his dearly beloved that he admits he's not able to be completely upfront – the kind of admission that will you win points for truthfulness but hardly for reassurance.

Finn is not so insecure, however, that he's unwilling to shift a bit of the blame onto his intended. The alternately soaring and plummeting single "World Where You Live" has him wondering just which planet his increasingly distracted girlfriend is visiting – and whether he should join her there – while "Mean to Me" is a hilarious and rather brutal recounting of a real-life encounter with a pitiable groupie. And then there's the album's says-it-all capper, "That's What I Call Love," in which Finn waxes eloquent about the spiritual exhaustion this love thang has caused him: "You take away my air/You make my lungs collapse/I die tonight/Feeling devastated ... /Tired and deflated/That's what I call/Love."

All this continuity of amorous confusion duly pointed out, it should be emphatically added that Crowded House seems a far ballsier outfit than Split Enz, a fine band with its own merits that never quite put its art-rock brooding and moping tendencies aside long enough to get loose. The new trio – no doubt under the influence of L.A. producer Mitchell Froom (the Del Fuegos, Peter Case, Richard Thompson) – has come up with a rootsy and infectious batch of songs.

The only obvious prog-rock holdover touches come with "Hole in the River," an apparent meditation on mortality that fades out to the sound of an otherworldly operatic soprano wailing for her life over a spooky barrelhouse piano. But even that lone outer-limits visitation is immediately followed, in the opening to "I Walk Away," by a heartland-style guitar riff that could've come from the mega-mainstream mentality of a Bryan Adams. Almost all of the album is brash and overtly saleable; it's hard to fathom radioland's not finding room for Crowded House among its many m

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Crowded House - Crowded House