The House Needs a Deeper Setting

CROWDED HOUSE

“Woodface”

Capitol

**1/2 If you attack the grotesqueness and superficiality of popular culture as scathingly as Crowded House does in “Chocolate Cake,” you’d better back it up with something pretty substantial. But these pop classicists follow that album-opening invective with a collection that bounces from the smug to the saccharine and only occasionally strikes an emotional resonance.

Operating on the Beatles ideal--meticulously proportioned arrangements that admit a little calculated raucousness, winsome voices that combine innocence with weariness, sweet-and-sour harmonies--Crowded House is a band that lives and dies by the hook. But principal writer Neil Finn doesn’t really come up with a lot of great ones, and there’s little passion in the music to compensate.

Rigorous, knotty lyrics depict characters at tense impasses, in the backwash of a breakup, in wistful reverie and in the grips of theological and alcohol crises. It adds up to a hard-bitten, downbeat vision with an edge of humor, and it cries out for a more deeply felt musical setting. The group assimilates new member Tim Finn, Neil’s brother and his former partner in Split Enz, with hardly a ripple--too bad, because his tempestuousness could bring the music a much needed jolt. For now, the house may be crowded, but it’s also awfully cold.