Crowded House 3: Woodface

On a break from Crowded House, Neil Finn began recording a few songs with his brother (and former bandmate in Split Enz) Tim. When the time came to do another Crowded House album, those sessions didn’t go as well, so some of the Finn Brothers songs were brought into the sequence. Tim came along for the ride, so the House was very Crowded indeed.

Woodface sports fourteen tracks and runs for 48 minutes, for something of an overstuffed listening experience. The splendor of such potential classics as “It’s Only Natural” and “Weather With You” has to compete with the brothers’ harmonizing. It’s toned back a bit on “Fall At Your Feet” and “Four Seasons In One Day”, giving the songs more room to breathe. “Tall Trees” and “There Goes God” feature a prominent canned harmonica, and the dated lyrical references in “Chocolate Cake” prove that this is one band that needn’t be topical.

There is an attempt to be democratic; Tim’s solo take of “All I Ask” is given a lush Sinatra arrangement, and Paul Hester’s “Italian Plastic” would soon become a live favorite. (He also gets credit for the hidden track “I’m Still Here”, deflating the yearning of “How Will You Go”.) But we miss the simple charm of the boys working as a unit, as they reach beyond producer Mitchell Froom to ten other listed “additional musicians”.

Woodface is best taken in small pieces, as there’s just something redundant about the album. It was a worldwide smash, except in the US, where it still got decent reviews, with the apparent exception of this one. Therefore it is with full expectation of charges of blasphemy, treason and worse that we say it’s just okay, and we have never played it twice in a row. (The Deluxe Edition will be lots of fun for those who do adore this album, the demos run the gamut from the Finn brothers’ sessions to the Tim-less band. They also get two more songs from the pre-Tim sessions, the “complete” version of “I’m Still Here”, and the legendary B-side “The Burglar’s Song”, co-written the then-seven-year-old Liam Finn, which goes into a medley of House songs and a Ramones cover.)

Crowded House Woodface (1991)—3
2016 Deluxe Edition: same as 1991, plus 21 extra tracks