Crowded House 'Distant Sun'

Chart Peak: 19

YouTube

Neil, Nick, Mark and Paul are Crowded House... 'Distant Sun' was the first Top 20 hit from the new Together Alone project which has already been hailed as a worthy successor to the million-selling Woodface album.

Well, I'm going to stick my neck out and say that Together Alone is actually an even better album than Woodface, indeed the best Crowded House album of all. It's certainly better-sequenced. This is curiously the only one of five UK hits from the album to appear on a Now album, and more remarkably it's arguably the fourth consecutive folk-rock track on Now! 26, which I'm pretty sure is the only such run in the whole series. Although they have released a lot of genre-based spin-offs recently, so maybe it's only a matter of time until we get Now That's What I Call Folk-Rock.

Anyway, 'Distant Sun' is one of those songs that  has a slightly odd place in the canon: it's not the first song anyone would think of when the subject of Crowded House came up, and I never think of it as one my favourites of theirs. And yet whenever I listen to it, when it comes up on shuffle on my MP3 player or gets played on the radio, I can't resist it, and find myself either singing along or trying very hard not to, according to circumstance. In fact I've just had to put the album on now while I'm writing this post. As I've mentioned before, they're a band who have an undeserved MOR reputation in some places but are actually much more subtle than that, with Neil Finn's melodies often developing in surprising directions and evoking complex moods: often unsettling but also leavened with a comforting human warmth. It's difficult to parse exactly what 'Distant Sun' is actually about: possibly a tempestuous relationship, possibly caring for somebody with a mental health problem (both topics that appear elsewhere on the album), possibly neither. Either way it feels like it's all centred around the key lyric in the middle eight; "I don't pretend to know what you want, but I offer love." There's something deeply adorable about the combination of resignation and hope in that.

Musically, it's a more conventionally accessible track (which is presumably why it was picked as lead single from the album). The structure is fairly conventional, adorned by chiming guitars (presumably from new member Mark Hart) and some of Nick Seymour's usual quietly superb bass-playing. The only real flaw is that it lacks an ending and seems to drift into a fade. Oh and the video's a bit rubbish too.

Also appearing on: 21, 22, 23, 34, 35
Available on: Together Alone