1981@40: COROBOREE - SPLIT ENZ

Choruses soar from tense verses with a tight reign kept on minor tonality and it's a new Split Enz album. At this distance it's difficult to tell how much self-reflection there was in starting the follow up to their worldwide breakthrough with a song called Hard Act to Follow.  True Colours showed the band either catching up to the shifts in the culture or perhaps finding the reverse. Either way, the sophomore effort after the reset shows a struggle to do more than stay put. That might be a strange observation to make considering the presence of two Neil Finn penned hits but that's the problem, they don't just stand out as obvious singles; they are the only two songs on the album you recall after hearing it.

That doesn't mean there aren't strong melodies or good ideas here it's just that the rest of the record feels like album tracks and b-sides. That it's buried under contemporary modern production only accentuates this. To my mind it feels rushed, the production barely concealing a lack of finish in the writing. Two more Eddie Rayner instrumentals that sound like chase scenes in cop shows. A song that mentions dancing that has a verse over a chugalug  backing and a call and response chorus form fitted for a blue light disco. Tim Finn's attempt at developing the sublime I Hope I Never in Ghost Girl oddly leaves out the eeriness and everything gets served up with side dishes of sequenced synths. This is a producer's album rather than a band's and it would get worse along those lines and let anyone who had worried that the tidier lines of the visual image and absorption of top ten style were heralding the end of the Enz keep worrying.

But emerging from this troubling anti-entropic push towards order by the old merchants of chaos is a pair of songs that became the singles, having no opposing candidates. History Never Repeats slashes into life with a fanfare of chorused guitars over a rumble and the chorus beginning before the drums. There's a freefall to it but the band comes in for the verse with a rhythm that pounds and shrieks and the choruses just keep getting bigger to the point that the block harmonies that come out of a short guitar break threaten to sound like the hell of ELO or The Eagles until the last verse bashes them aside. One more chorus and powerchord fade out and you've got a 1981 hit single. Repeatability maximum.

One Step Ahead was released in advance of the album and then trusted enough to go on as track 2. A strange descending figure on the bass and palm muted guitar. Neil Finn enters with a near whispered plea about his girl gaming on the edge of danger and its kept hushed and spooky with muted keyboards and vocals that don't quite break out with the rest of the band to the point that a wordless verse of la-las feels like going down a corridor in a horror movie. At no point is this anything but pure commercial pop music. It never plays it for spooky camp but never gives up its suggestion of danger. 

If you were listening years later as I am now you might well think it was the sound of Neill Finn bracing himself for the exit at the end of the darkened hallway. That would happen a few albums on as Split Enz drifted ever further from the quirk that made the anti guitar solo in I See Red such fun. Neil Finn would stretch himself with nothing but credibility when he formed Crowded House for songs not bound by a tradition he had come late to. By the time the new band were claiming world wide high chart positions only the voice sounded the same, the craft had expanded, not with the times, just for better times.

This is not to bury Split Enz as they had years yet before they ran aground. Time and Tide had some superb moments on it. Tim Finn's solo effort (which sounded like the AOR numbers on Enz albums) was also a hit. But the sound Neil's restless invention here, set in an increasingly radio friendly loss of flavour is telling. The world doesn't know it but they are waiting for his escape. Until then there were tours, interviews, videos and the whole shower of malarky for an act in which he was a tenant who dreamt of owning his own home.