Album Review: Crowded House - 'Dreamers Are Waiting'

This new Crowded House release is both familiar and new. 

Nick Seymour’s artwork and the Finn-led vocals take the devoted listener instantly back to wherever they were when they first loved the band (at any point over the last few decades), and now one of the original ‘background collaborators’, super producer Mitchell Froom, is front and centre on keys. Also now foreground players are Neil’s sons Liam and Elroy Finn, who have appeared with him in various projects before but are now fully blown members of the band. Fans might remember them as little kids from ‘behind the scenes’ clips and the odd guest appearance over the years, but here they are now as grown men, songwriters and performers with depth and nuance in spades.

Single To The Island is like the best of Crowded House’s ‘catchy’ back catalogue - a song that begs relistens and rewards with something new each time. Openers for the album proper, Bad Times Good and Playing With Fire are more collaborative and divergent – the latter with traces of music-made-during-lockdown, including delightfully paranoid content and even using the word ‘quarantine’ as a rhyme ("My wife is wild in quarantine / The chairman's got it in for me"), embracing the darkness and making it useful. The result is a clear heralding of a new type of Crowded House. Three Finns are listed as songwriters for these songs too, with different ‘voices’ in terms of players and styles providing a delightful mash-up that moves in and out through each piece.

Later on in the collection other collaborations between players emerge - Liam and Neil on Start Of Something; Elroy and Neil on Love Isn't Hard At All. In each case there’s obviously a ‘base line’ but the travels beyond it are so interesting. Liam and Neil are well established together and this is another in their great process of pushing each other - Liam’s sound always reminds of his uncle Tim in terms of risk taking and spark, and here is another example. Meanwhile this collaboration with Elroy takes little detours that are fascinating. We swear half way through Love Isn’t Hard At All (which also features Sharon Finn on vocals) there’s a cameo by the theme from the video game Tetris - jumping in as something playful and domestic but also to trigger something buried deep in the listener’s brain. It did exactly what the song proclaimed – suddenly things aren’t hard at all.

Together, the album is a collection of little three minute (ish) marvels – lush, whimsical and interesting. There’s also the gentle comfort that so much of the music during this time has brought when we didn’t quite know what else could do it. It's a perfect cocktail of escapism and whimsy – see also the hook of “these little things are sent to try us” on Too Good For This World; or the cryptic dedication of Real Life Woman and Whatever You Want.

Trainspotters will also note the final ‘word’, a dedication to New Zealand muso and Midnight Oil bassist  Bones Hillman, who died last year.

Find out more about Crowded House here.