Crowded House - Crowded House

With their eponymously titled album Crowded house well and truly set out their stall. An album stuffed to the grooves with melodious gems. The song writing shows its immaturity occasionally but mainly holds up to comparisons with their later albums. Neil Finn, the main contributing writer brings together a disparate collection of tracks, sometimes almost sounding like a sampler album. Filled with clever and oblique lyrics, with more emphasis on the evocative nature of the words rather than their literal context. The centre piece of the album is the now classic ‘Don’t dream its over’, a candidate for best rock ballad if there ever was one. On this ...  Read the complete review

The problem with this, the first Crowded House album, is that it is not as consistant as their other albums; although all of the songs are still very good the rest of the tracks have a very hard job in trying to stand up to 'Don't dream it's over'. I think that this song is definately a contender for the best pop song ever. If you haven't heard it before it is worth buying the album for this song alone; the melody is perfect and the backing is beautiful but also quite unusual with the chord structure changing on each chorus. The rest of the material is good, but just not as good as this track; other highlights include the vocal harmonies to ...  Read the complete review

Crowded House are a New Zealand trio of Neil Finn, Paul Hester and Nicholas Seymour. This album featured both the vocal and writing skills of Neil Finn. This album would have been worth the purchase price for the evocative 'Don't dream it's over'. The album sounds like a debut album trying to give each part of it's perceived audience the type of track it would like but not to the exclusion of others. At the same time Neil Finn also laid the foundation that would give continuity to the recognisable sound and style of Crowded House in the future. I felt that there was a mixture of influences. On listening I thought I could hear ...  Read the complete review