Crowded House: Together Alone : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Eight years ago, Crowded House earned themselves an enduring reputation as perky pop craftsmen. With buoyant guitars and boyish ebullience on such songs as "Something So Strong," from their debut album, Crowded House (1986), it's no wonder. The group seemed like a bunch of goofy expats from New Zealand and Australia having themselves a laugh in Los Angeles.

What has been consistently overlooked is the melancholy lurking around the edges of much of the band's material, subverting and deepening the pop. Together Alone was recorded not in Los Angeles but along an isolated beach called Kare Kare on the west coast of New Zealand – "the end of the earth," as the band's main singer/songwriter, Neil Finn, has called it.

On Together Alone, Crowded House's fourth album, the lurking melancholy has come out of the shadows and moved into the foreground. The guitars are still intricately interwoven; they ring and echo. Pretty, alluring sounds are still juxtaposed with ugly scenes (as on "Catherine Wheels," about domestic strife, and the floating "Nails in My Feet"), a dramatic technique that may be the band's forte. But the lyrics are full of caves, dark holes and areas of concealment. That's reflective of the landscape, no doubt, but also metaphorical, given the album's concerns – for life's progressive uncertainty.

Many of the tracks on Together Alone are contemplative meanderings rather than playful romps. While some, such as "Black and White Boy" and "Pineapple Head," are noisy and irritating, others transport. On "Kare Kare," Finn sings, "Sleep by no means comes too soon/In a valley lit by the moon," to which a high-pitched guitar calls like a whale in the distance.

Elsewhere, peppy tunes and bittersweet love songs reminiscent of "Don't Dream It's Over" (a defining hit from the first album) have been replaced by weird sounds and angry sarcasm. The first single, "Locked Out," an up-tempo rocker about a relationship's end, works into a messy jam; on "In My Command," another loud guitar track with aggressive vocals, Finn sings, "I would love to trouble you in your time of need/Lose your way/It's a pleasure when you're in my command."

There's even a song about death: "Together Alone" starts off with a lonely drum, Finn's two verses are broken up by the haunting Te Waka Huia Cultural Group Choir, and the song ends with polyrhythmic percussion by a troupe of New Zealand log drummers. So much for perky pop. Such exotic flourishes may seem bizarre coming from the nice boys who make up Crowded House, but at moments, those touches sound ethereally beautiful.