pop.

Part of that fetching paradox lies in Finn's distinctive melodies – filled with irresistible borderline-bubblegum chord progressions 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