Crowded House: Raising the Roof

R apture is a word you don’t hear much in connection with pop music anymore; the idea of being magically carried off to some dangerously uncharted height by an unexpected turn of intense musical phrase seems much too much to hope for in what one wag has dubbed the Madonna Moment.

But Crowded House is a band that delights in the unexpected. Beats change and moods shift with a sort of gorgeous violence. Controlled passages give way to codas of utter frenzy. Their chord progressions--which have a classicist beauty rare in this thing called beat music--rarely ascend or descend to the exact place you expect them to go; they end up somewhere far lovelier.

And singer/songwriter Neil Finn himself may not go where you’d expect him to. Opening a two-night stand Thursday at the Pantages Theatre, this somewhat absurdist New Zealander ended up horsing around in the balcony at one point, leaving his comrades down below to announce, Elvis-style, that “Neil Finn has left the building.” (They’re more than capable of carrying on without him; drummer Paul Hester, one of the funniest men in rock, improvised with a sad retelling of “The Brady Bunch” as dysfunctional family.)

There’s a true formal elegance to Crowded House’s music, but there’s also a wonderful sense that anything can happen --from bar to bar in a song, from minute to minute in a concert.

The fact is that Crowded House is very likely the closest thing we have to a perfect pop band on the planet right now--a group of wildly intelligent and challenging (but very handsome) lads that shrieking teen-age girls and sophisticated art monsters can agree on like few outfits since the Liverpool lads circa ’68. Before this group, Finn was in Split Enz, a band that cheekily dared to combine “progressive rock” and “new wave” tendencies; Crowded House does all that too, but filters everything through the exuberant hookiness of the British Invasion.

The trio (augmented with a keyboard player on tour) has turned in a series of terrific performances in town over the last three years, but none nearly as strong as Thursday’s set, a brilliant two-hour show that seemed to touch on every modern music genre and every known human emotion along the way.

Crowded House has a fairly wacky image, fostered by frequent outbursts of goofy behavior on stage and an often-cheerful tenor to the melodies and harmonies. Certainly it’s possible to appreciate the band entirely on that delightfully superficial level. But its frontman is at heart a serious, possibly even melancholy fellow, and the concert didn’t stint on that side either.

Finn writes from the point of view of a nervous romantic, which gives a real edge to even the more-upbeat-sounding fare--from the gentle “Better Be Home Soon” (which is more ominous than it at first sounds) to the ecstatic, hard-hitting “Love You ‘Til the Day I Die” (likewise neurotic). Perhaps his finest compromise is “Love This Life,” a typically uneasy but finally affirmative paean to all that is mortal.

Elsewhere, the band used clever snippets of outside material to reinforce mood: The lovelorn “Don’t Dream It’s Over” gave way to a soft, brief chorus of the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do is Dream.” The spooky “Hole in the River,” a moody meditation on death with a funky wah-wah guitar interlude, gave way to a touching a-cappella rendition of an old Clancy Brothers Irish folk song, “The Parting Glass.” An obscure 1971 Top 40 hit, the Five Man Electrical Band’s “Signs,” was incorporated into a surprisingly ferocious rap song by Hester (apparently off the top of his head) for one of the many encores.

Among the other peaks reached late in the show: “Sister Madly,” which had a transcendently jazzy acoustic guitar solo from surprise guest Richard Thompson, and “When You Come,” an exercise in crescendo and barely disguised sexual ecstasy that would leave Prince purple with envy.

Opening the show was the unadvertised Roger McGuinn, who started off alone with his trusty 12-string, interjecting a few new tunes amid the many oldies he introduced with a sort of “and then I wrote . . . “ self-archivist flavor.

But then up went the curtain, and there to accompany him on his final four selections was Crowded House as the Byrds. Someone in the audience tossed a beach ball into the air, and for a few moments it was the Summer of Love--sober, this time, for as McGuinn noted in his final introduction, “Eight Miles High” was actually “about an airplane ride over to London.”

LIVE ACTION: Chicago and the Beach Boys are pairing up for shows at the Pacific Amphitheatre on May 27 and at the Hollywood Bowl on May 28. Both are on sale now. . . . Eight acts go on sale for the Universal on Sunday: Hank Williams Jr. (June 15 and 16), Tiffany (June 25), the Monkees (July 9), America and Three Dog Night (Aug. 1 and 2), Phyllis Hyman (Aug. 6), Randy Travis and K.T. Oslin (Aug. 8-10), Tony Bennett (Aug. 25) and Randy Newman (Aug. 26). .