lead singer, guitarist and songwriter – has turned protectively inward. Rather than making him more expansive, or at least steeling him, success appears to have made Finn feel more vulnerable, less sure of himself and even a tad bitter. Fortunately, Finn is so skillful and articulate a songwriter that he manages to freshen up the clichés of loneliness at the top. He checks his infallible instinct for lush pop melodies, making the songs a bit harder to enter and bringing his music in line with his themes. Exercising his talent in restraint – needless to say, a rarity in the pop-music biz – Finn renders the darkness at the heart of this album convincing and compelling.
The wariness that has often informed Finn's love songs – from "I Got You," which he wrote and sang with Split Enz, to the edgy "That's What I Call Love," which closed Crowded House – pervades the world in general on Temple of Low Men. The album opens with the hypnotic ballad "I Feel Possessed," an eerie, pretty song that probes the potential loss of identity that, for Finn, laces any love relationship with danger. In that emotional context, the romantic commonplaces Finn croons – "We are one person," "I feel you underneath my skin," "I feel possessed when you come round" – assume the air of invasive threat, helped along by producer Mitchell Froom's ominous keyboards.
Even a legitimate desire to preserve the boundaries of the self, however, can become, imperceptibly, a kind of egotism – a condition too easily indulged in the heady worlds of love and celebrity. Another introspective ballad, "Into Temptation" – as insightful a song about the lure of infidelity as Squeeze's "Tempted" – sketches the narcissistic self-deceptions that can lead people to deceive others. "A muddle of nervous words/Could never amount to betrayal," Finn sings in one of the song's verses, the hesitation in his voice suggesting an entirely opposite truth – and an uncomfortable awareness of his own hypocrisy.
The elaborately arranged, emotionally textured "Mansion in the Slums" sketches an almost parodic portrait of a star whose appetites – and problems and paranoia – metastasize beyond all control. "Who can stop me, with money in my pocket?" he says boastfully at one point, adding later, with a punch-drunk swagger, "What I mean is, would you mind if I had it all
