It can be a somber business indeed when success - somehow it's never failure - leads a rock band to wonder, What does it all mean? And it's particularly unsettling that Crowded House has been moved to such musings. After all, it seemed like such a victory when the lovely "Don't Dream It's Over," from the band's first album, Crowded House, cracked the Top Ten last year and brought this trio much deserved notoriety.

That victory may have rung hollow. On the follow-up album, Temple of Low Men, Neil Finn - the band's lead singer, guitarist and songwriter - has turned protectively inward. Rather than making him more expansive, or at least steeling him, success appears to have made Finn feel more vulnerable, less sure of himself and even a tad bitter.

Fortunately, Finn is so skillful and articulate a songwriter that he manages to freshen up the clichés of loneliness at the top. He checks his infallible instinct for lush pop melodies, making the songs a bit harder to enter and bringing his music in line with his themes. Exercising his talent in restraint - needless to say, a rarity in the pop-music biz - Finn renders the darkness at the heart of this album convincing and compelling.

The wariness that has often informed Finn's love songs - from "I Got You," which he wrote and sang with Split Enz, to the edgy "That's What I Call Love," which closed Crowded House - pervades the world in general on Temple of Low Men. The album opens with the hypnotic ballad "I Feel Possessed," an eerie, pretty song that probes the potential loss of identity that, for Finn, laces any love relationship with danger. In that emotional context, the romantic commonplaces Finn croons - "We are one person," "I feel you underneath my skin," "I feel possessed when you come round" - assume the air of invasive threat, helped along by producer Mitchell Froom's ominous keyboards.

Even a legitimate desire to preserve the boundaries of the self, however, can become, imperceptibly, a kind of egotism - a condition too easily indulged in the heady worlds of love and celebrity. Another introspective ballad, "Into Temptation" - as insightful a song about the lure of infidelity as Squeeze's "Tempted" - sketches the narcissistic self-deceptions that can lead people to deceive others. "A muddle of nervous words/Could never amount to betrayal," Finn sings in one of the song's verses, the hesitation in his voice suggesting an entirely opposite truth - and an uncomfortable awareness of his own hypocrisy.

The elaborately arranged, emotionally textured "Mansion in the Slums" sketches an almost parodic portrait of a star whose appetites - and problems and paranoia - metastasize beyond all control. "Who can stop me, with money in my pocket?" he says boastfully at one point, adding later, with a punch-drunk swagger, "What I mean is, would you mind if I had it all?/I'll take it when it comes." That insatiable desire for more is mocked both by the song's derisive keyboard-derived horn parts and by the singer's knowledge that "the taste of success only lasts you half an hour or less.... You laugh at yourself while you're bleeding to death."

Of course, not all of Temple of Low Men is quite this bleak. Images of love and devotion tumble forth with breathless intensity on the urgent "When You Come," which builds to the declaration "I know I could never let you down/When you come."

"Never Be the Same" acknowledges a relationship in trouble and counsels against passivity in the face of those problems: "Don't stand around like friends at a funeral. ... We might still survive/And rise up through the mist/If you could change your life." In fact, ambivalence and an overall lack of certainty - rather than the desperation Finn occasionally flirts with - might finally be what Temple of Low Men is about.

"Better Be Home Soon," the spare, country-tinged ballad that ends the album, is simultaneously a plea for a lover's return and an ultimatum: "Don't say nothing's wrong/'Cause when you get back home/Maybe I'll be gone." "Love This Life," which was set to be the album's closing number before "Better Be Home Soon" was chosen at the last moment, veers between grim irony and wistful poignancy, never settling in either place. "Don't you just love this life/When it's holding you down?" Finn asks sardonically at one point, before earnestly asserting in the song's chorus, "After all my complaining/I'm gonna love this life."

Sonically, Temple of Low Men is a far more straightforward affair. As they did on Crowded House, Finn, bassist Nick Seymour and drummer Paul Hester join with producer and keyboardist Mitchell Froom to fashion a sound that is lean and simple, focused intently on the needs of the specific songs. Froom occasionally adds touches of Beatles-style psychedelia on keyboards, a modest effect that intensifies the album's atmosphere of surreal disorientation. But for the most part, when the members of Crowded House want to establish a mood, they rely on the structure of the songs, their own marvelously apt playing and Finn's eloquent vocals to get the job done. And they get the job done handily. Temple of Low Men is not as immediately winning a record as Crowded House, but it's smart, mature and honest. If on that first album the band could sing joyfully, "Now we're gettin' somewhere," Temple of Low Men is the story of what happened after they arrived. One hopes that each successive phase of the Crowded House journey will prove so rich a tale.

(RS 530-531) ANTHONY DECURTIS