Crowded House - The VeryVery Best Of

Thu 16th Dec, 2010 in Music Reviews

When I started high school in 1996, I was convinced that Crowded House was the coolest band on earth. Though I was soon converted to the 90s teen-boy staples like Metallica and Nirvana, their cassette of was usually bouncing around my bag (home-taping is killing the music industry, kids, don’t do it). Twelve-year-old me completely missed the righteous fury of Chocolate Cake, and the adult intimacy of Fall At Your Feet was too mature for my teenage brain to understand, but something resonated strongly enough that the memory of it is still with me today.

Of course, the danger in returning to the beloved music of childhood is that it might not live up to your memories, and in so doing, sully the moments you associate with it (hello, Crash Test Dummies). With Crowded House, though, there is no such disappointment; if anything, the sophisticated songwriting is more suited to adult ears, rich with musical and lyrical subtleties that went unnoticed by my younger self. In the case of Crowded House, calling the band Adult-Oriented Rock is less a euphemistic swipe than a reflection of the maturity their music demands.

Take for example the aching Into Temptation. Soft and delicate, Neil Finn conjures an amazing air of sensuality free of physical weight, rendering the central couple’s lovemaking a transcendental act. The chorus lyric “into temptation/knowing full well that the earth will rebel” is deceptively simple, flirting with the cliché that is ‘forbidden love’ even as his characters find bliss in succumbing to desire. Few poets could interweave the sexual and the spiritual with such a light touch, but Neil does it with an easy grace, and wraps it all in a gorgeous pop song to boot.

At this point, it seems like a pointless task to describe Crowded House’s music. The band has been so ingrained in the Australian consciousness that it seems hard to imagine that anyone has managed to miss them so far (for those of you that haven’t, there’s always the Internet). Their 1991 album, Woodface, was ranked #3 in the recent list of the 100 Best Australian Albums, and their 1996 best-of collection Recurring Dream sat at Number One on two separate occasions, eventually going a stunning 13-times platinum (translating to sales of just over 900 000 copies).

This begs the question as to why we need another Crowded House best-of, when it seems that just about everyone already has one. The cynical response would be to point out that it’s Christmas time, where all sorts of Greatest Hits packages and Limited Edition albums are released to the gift-hungry crowds.

While the time of year no doubt factored into considerations, there are other arguments in defence of The Very, Very Best Of Crowded House. All 19 tracks from Recurring Dream appear here, bolstered by a further 12 studio tracks and a live cut of Hunters & Collector’s Throw Your Arms Around Me. As a result, every single from 1986’s Mean to Me up to Pour Le Monde, from 2007’s Time On Earth, is represented.

Though there’s nothing added that will radically alter anyone’s perception of Crowded House, it does stand as a testament to Neil Finn’s remarkable consistency as a songwriter, given that many of the latter-period songs fit so neatly alongside their older relatives. It’s also a pleasure to see the song Recurring Dream included, especially since the last best-of took it as a title without including it on the tracklist.