Crowded House: Woodface : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Crowded House is presently the leading exponent of a comfortingly familiar style that began with Cole Porter and took on further luster in the hands of Buddy Holly, the Beatles, the Kinks, the Police and Squeeze. A sophisticated style that has maintained its popularity for several decades, this kind of classic pop tends to be cheerful yet sardonic, sleek, urbane and highly melodic. At its worst, it's quaint. At its best, it combines the essential aspects of short-story writing with tunes that are easy to whistle.

The latter description fits Woodface, the third album by this New Zealand quartet. Woodface is a swinging record that finds the band gliding through its material with ease – crisp harmonies and memorable hooks abound. Heading the band is vocalist-writer Neil Finn, who first attracted attention in 1977 as a member of the cult glam-pop outfit Split Enz. That band, which broke up in 1984, also included Neil's brother Tim, and on Woodface, the brothers are reunited for the first time in seven years – Tim is now an official resident of the House.

If lust is the motor that drives rock & roll, love is what makes the pop world go round, and longings of the head and heart take precedence over more primal drives in Neil Finn's writing. The album features a handful of exquisite love songs – the best of them, "It's Only Natural," is perfumed with a bittersweet yearning evocative of classic Brian Wilson. One could fault Finn's writing for the fact that the content of his songs is sometimes more original than their form. For instance, "There Goes God" suggests that God is jealous of the devil because the infernal one has more sex appeal, while "All I Ask" celebrates the pleasures of amnesia. Such provocative ideas, alas, come in standard pop packaging.

Even more curious, the only objectionable song on the record, "Chocolate Cake," has been released as the first single. This song, which lambastes America as a spoiled culture of overfed vulgarians, seems hypocritical given that Crowded House relocated to L.A. in order to kick its career into high gear. This, however, is a minor glitch in an otherwise perfectly enjoyable, if unspectacular, album.