Kritik zu Recurring Dream
The War Against Silence #77, 18 July 96
(englisch) Review by glenn mcdonald
Crowded House: Recurring Dream + Live Album
My CD-shelving scheme recognizes three different interpretations of "pop". The center one, which I called "Alternative" when I started categorizing things, back in 1985, before it became clear that if I didn't think up some better terms 80% of my collection was going to end up under this one, has now been clarified to be the American guitar-centric version of pop that starts, for me, with Big Star,
follows Scott Miller and Mitch Easter threads through a thicket of interrelated and largely South-Eastern bands (including, most popularly, REM), loses its geographical coherency in a sequence that goes from Pop Art to American Music Club via Del Amitri, and ends up, at the frenetic extreme, with Too Much Joy. The right-hand one, as you face my shelves (and lean to your right to read the case spines) is my amalgamation of synth-, dance-, power-, trash-, quirk-,
geek- and other miscellaneous hyphenated -pops, which covers things from Yaz to ABBA to the Knack to Pat Benetar to They Might Be Giants to the Bobs, with an emphasis, TMBG notwithstanding, on the shiny and ultracommercial. And the left-hand one is, vaguely speaking, the British complement to the American wing, starting at XTC and Joe Jackson, skittering out to the Beautiful South, and from there continuing along a chain of associations past the Smiths to the
Icicle Works and out, before you have time to really protest, to EMF and Jesus Jones, which is where you realize that you've lost track of whatever point it is I think I'm making, and are tired of holding your head to the side like that for so long. Inclusion and position in these genres is rather arbitrary, to be generous, but
some minor relevance, at least, devolves from the fact that, while I have a hard time explaining the boundaries of these groupings, I do at least have extremely clear ideas about what bands constitute their cores and make, most purely, the music that I mean the divisions, as sets, to refer to. In the American section it's the Connells, and in shiny commercial pop it is, of course, Roxette. In the Britpop section it used to be the Housemartins/Beautiful South continuum, or
maybe it was XTC. Or Squeeze. Or perhaps Prefab Sprout. In fact, that whole section only really started making sense a couple years ago when "Locked Out" turned me suddenly into a crazed Crowded House fan, and I realized that they're the archetype I was looking for. Pop, to me, is the triumph of melody over all else, and its British incarnation achieves this victory unhurriedly, with dignity and grace. Nobody epitomizes this balance of rapturous beauty and smooth unobtrusiveness better for me than Crowded House. Of course, Crowded House aren't technically British, but to
Americans, the distinction between Basil Fawlty and Crocodile Dundee was always a little tenuous, and given that most people educated here couldn't get you from Topeka to Toledo without a snorkel and a passport, asking them to remember that New Zealand is yet somewhere else, a thousand miles of ocean away from that funny clamshell building that vies with the big Foster's can for the tiny slot most people free up in their mind for a mental image of "Down
Under", is probably overambitious. As is usually the case with bands I really like, on some level I will always be mystified that anybody would want a collection like this. Crowded House's albums are so great, and there's only four of them, so why would anybody need
such a manageable canon abridged? If given the task of whittling the forty-eight songs from the four albums down for the purposes of a compilation, I'd promptly draw a line through Chocolate Cake, which has always grated on my nerves, and then I'd be stuck. I could eliminate a few more if I started sniping at any song whose chorus didn't immediately spring to my mind from reading the title (I Walk Away? In the Lowlands? Tall Trees
?), but if I went and listened to those songs to refresh my memory, I'm sure I'd want to reinstate them. Part of the fractal mastery of Crowded House is that their chiming guitars, aching harmony, and elegant melodies are wherever you look for them. No amount of inspection will reveal hidden ugliness, because it just isn't there.
Put the other way, I guess this is their fatal flaw, as well: it is rare for a Crowded House song to really stand out. By sacrificing barbs to escape flaws, they achieve a sort of covert perfection which you have to go out of your way to experience. These are not songs that you hear once and develop a mad crush on for a week, these are songs that you take for granted for years, and then, when some other musical romance sours and leaves you in a state of
unusual awareness, suddenly realize that you've gradually fallen in love with, and know that this slow conversion will outlast a thousand seemingly more spectacular affairs. Every one of you who can't say that they hate Crowded House, how do you know that you aren't a tiny epiphany away from adoring them? I'm projecting my own experience onto you again (here, let me get you a
napkin), but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. I suppose I'm also revealing my biases about the structure of romance; I don't believe in love at first sight, in dating services, even really in dates. I believe in friends first, and one day, in my versions of all the fables, you marry your best one. This would be a much more useful belief if more of my best friends weren't already married or engaged to other people. But whatever the factors that militate against this collection's construction, the task was assigned to somebody less convinced than I of its futility, and so we have Recurring Dream, a nineteen-song synopsis of Crowded House's oeuvre for the completist and the novitiate alike. Looking over its track listing, it's clear that the first tactic used to avoid my paralysis was starting from nothing, not
everything. Without all forty-eight songs protesting their cases at once, it becomes possible to make a few unassailable selections: World Where You Live and Don't Dream It's Over, certainly, from the debut; Into Temptation and Better Be Home Soon from the underrated Temple of Low Men; Weather With You and Four Seasons in One Day from the dual-Finn-ed Woodface; Locked Out and Private Universe
from Together Alone. Surely these choices could hurt nobody else's feelings. And then, on a second pass, you take a couple supplements from each record. They're all good, so it doesn't make that much difference (and if you move quickly the omissions won't have time to hurt): Something So Strong and Mean to Me, When You Come and I Feel Possessed, Fall at Your Feet and It's Only Natural, Pineapple Head
and Distant Sun. These are all great songs. Yes, if you go back and itemize the ones left behind, you can make yourself sad (no Hole in the River? no Sister Madly? There Goes God? How Will You Go? Catherine Wheels and Together Alone?), but just don't do that. These sixteen tell the story as well as any sixteen could, and there's only so much room on a CD. Filling the rest of it, in fact, are three new songs, included to sell a few more copies to fanatics like me. The first of these, Not the Girl You Think You Are, is a bit slight for a Very Best of, unless George Harrison homages are much more to your liking than they are to mine. Instinct, though, simmers and
breathes like a demo for the fifth album that never was, and the rumbling Everything Is Good for You, which concludes the collection, acts as the band's farewell in a way that none of their existing songs, inextricable from their contexts of beloved familiarity, could have. Crowded House are gone now, Neil's energies turned with Tim to the Finn Brothers, and so this album is both a celebration and a requiem. It's rare that a set of songs serves both purposes so admirably.
(And since no good wake is complete without an encore, my early import copy comes with a bonus live album. Live versions have adorned the backs of many Crowded House singles over the years, and while the band's anti-pyrotechnic nature may make concert recordings seem like a less than exhilarating prospect,
for me the original versions of their songs seem so unalterable and necessary that I always find hearing them done any other way to be unexpectedly thrilling. When Neil's voice dips here, ever so slightly, on Don't Dream It's Over, in a place where the album version doesn't veer, it makes me pay closer attention both to this twist and to the place in the original where it isn't, and my devotion to both versions becomes all the more fierce for their interplay. The bonus further endears itself to me by rescuing several of the songs I missed from the first disc, including a set-opener of There Goes God and a breathtakingly beautiful rendition of How Will You Go. For people with no Crowded House to their name, the flimsy argument against buying the four
albums falls apart most of the rest of the way if you admit that you're willing to sit through two and a half hours of them, since the full catalog just grazes three, but for devotees, this is like a b-sides collection that simply (and, for those of us buying the singles at this end of the trans-Atlantic levies, mercifully) skips the uncollected step.) |