Listening to this is like putting that old comfy sweater that you keep at the back of the cupboard and only wear moping around the house but can’t bring yourself to throw away. It’s got holes at the elbows and is stretched at the sleeves, but you love it like a brother. It was my brother, or rather his muso friend, who introduced me to Crowded House. I was busy listening to Bowie and Led Zeppelin and Prince and Genesis during my teens and wasn’t impressed with most of the pop music of the day – heavily influenced by the Stock Aitken and Waterman’s shiny plastic pop-by-numbers output. Here, at last, were catchy contemporary songs, but with intelligent and interesting lyrics and subject matter. Woodface shows them at their most commercial, but they haven’t sold out. They still sing songs about the sickly saccharine of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and the “excess of fat on your American bones”, and about God with his sexy pants and sausage dog. But amongst the humour there are some starkly beautiful songs, with poignant lyrics and great harmonies, aided by Tim Finn, Neil’s older brother and fellow ex-Split Enz-er, effectively joining the band for this album. And it’s these slower, more poignant songs that clutched at me when I first heard this album, and played it hundreds of times since. Weather With You is a great tune, and lovely to strum along to on the guitar, but it’s Four Seasons In One Day which takes the lyric biscuit. Fall At Your Feet is as heartrendingly gorgeous as Don’t Dream It’s Over and All I Ask, which is such a perfectly composed and performed song, it sounds like a long-lost classic. #crowdedhouse @crowdedhousehq #fourseasonsinoneday #weatherwithyou #fallatyourfeet #woodface #newzealandmusic #nowlistening #nowplaying #recordcollection #randomrecordreview https://www.instagram.com/p/CGcTQOpJmDT/?igshid=1noyi8b27n6c6
