I met a meth addict in Sydney in 2006 who told me her life’s problems could all be explained by the lyrics of one seemingly simple song. “The Crowdies have a song about the weather,” she said. Her name was Laverne. “Heard of it?” Australians – especially Australian women – have the most mesmerizing way of speaking. Once in your life, you need to hear an Australian woman say the word ‘weather.’ Even for a fag, it’s like phone sex … in person. I suppose Australians speak a version of British English, but it’s infused with so much atmosphere, as if words originate not in the vocal chords but in the sky, or perhaps the sea, that it exposes people in the U.K. (not to mention the people in the U.S.) as irreparably tongue deficient.
I assured Laverne that I was indeed familiar with Crowded House. In the early 1990s, in Wisconsin, I went to visit my friend Julie one day. She was recovering from back surgery, recuperating in the dining room that her companion Carolyn had transformed, as only she can do, into a sanctuary of sorts, and at the midst of it, in my memory – which is, of course, not the memory of the person recovering from surgery – was a CD, although it may have been a cassette tape, called Woodface. So here we are, two decades and many continents and CDs later, and I’m in Portland and Julie is in Texas, where Carolyn is waging an all-out war with cancer, so it seems weirdly fitting that the Crowdies have just came out with a new one, called Intriguer.
I bought it this weekend. I cannot recall the last time I bought any brand new music, especially brand new music that hasn’t been out for at least a decade. And in the best way possible, I don’t like it.
I don’t fully understand my adoration for Crowded House. Technically, this band should not be part of my Australia fetish portfolio: the Finn brothers and others are from New Zealand, as so many in Sydney are, but they got their start in Australia. In 2005, the original drummer hung himself from a tree in his front yard in Melbourne. I haven’t put the calculator to work on this one, but it seems that far more words have been devoted to the death of the drummer than to the band’s entire body of music, which I find endearing for some reason. Of course, the band’s music is driven, in large part, by percussion, although it’s a whispery sort of percussion, so maybe the attention paid to his death isn’t just sweet but logical as well. Over the years they’ve recorded and toured with plenty of Australians (and even a few people from the U.S., which surprised me a bit). I probably wouldn’t say this if I were in Auckland, but since I’m in Portland I will say that I have to remind myself that the Crowdies are not, strictly speaking, an Australian band.
Pardon the cliché, but for me listening to most of their songs on all the previous CDs is something like looking at a painting over and over, and seeing something new each time. Or like reading a book you’ve read many times, only to discover entire passages you don’t recall. Most of their songs seem to me to have all kinds of detours that are jarring initially, but somehow, after some time passes, seem like the only way to go. All of their songs, I think, are steeped in unsentimental, magically understated and almost unbearable melancholy. It’s a wonder they aren’t black.
But the most notable aspect of Crowded House, for me, is that it’s taken at least a year to warm up to each of the CDs I own. Intriguer is the fifth in my collection, and it’s no different. I played it a few times over the weekend and didn’t really care for it. It’s inconsistent, veering, as they all do, recklessly in and out of all sorts of incongruent musical neighborhoods in a way that’s hard to follow. But if Intriguer is anything like the others, at some point it will morph, with zero warning, into something I love. The CD Together Alone is the best example of that phenomenon to date and, I think, the band’s best CD. I not only didn’t like it the first hundred or so times I listened to it, I actively disliked it. A lot. And then it all changed. The music shifted: the melodies, the musical incarnation, somehow, of clouds and breeze and waves and shadows and winter-grade sunlight in rooms with sand-colored walls, all of it slathered with heartache, all there in the songs, impossible to miss. My affair with that CD must be what it’s like to meet someone who is intolerable in an endless number of ways, and then find yourself, for reasons that you wouldn’t explain even if you could, marrying him.
I do.
But enough about what I think of Crowded House. Here’s what Neil Finn thinks of Crowded House, taken from a musing on the band’s website on his approach to live performances. “The intention is the same as ever to get the people involved, to hit some heights and leave the songs hanging in the air …” I just wrote seven paragraphs trying to say that.
Anyhow, I dislike Intriguer more than I disliked Together Alone, so my guess is that someday I’ll love it more as well. But for now it’s probably a good thing I’m not a music critic.
