Vinyl Tap: Crowded House - Temple of Low Men

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #57:

According to one of the memorable and melodic songs of pop apprehension that bejewel Crowded House’s foreboding Temple of Low Men — the propulsive "In the Lowlands" — "Black shapes gather in the distance / Looks like it won't take long." This 1988 album, after the success of the New Zealand group’s self-titled debut two years earlier, may have amounted to a sophomore slump commercially — two-hit wonderdom struck early with the dazzling "Don’t Dream It’s Over" and "Something So Strong" — but it’s a critically hailed and consistent album that, while perhaps not relatively radio- or MTV-friendly at the time, tempers any manic, all-over-the-map attempt to “catch the deluge in a paper cup.”

The enhanced dimensions of musical and lyrical gravitas strikes an evocative and cohesive chord of melancholy and mood due to Neil Finn's song craft and the production of Mitchell Froom, who took the new wavish Split Enz edge off to create a more psychologically fixed, if no less fixated, appeal for Temple. “My possessions are causing me suspicion” perhaps, but now stupefaction and paralysis really sets in “when you come like an iceberg float in darkness ... when you come your majesty to entrap me” (“When You Come).

While this latter lyrical bent might have zigged to similar wordplay as illustrated in the virtually lone upbeat track, the rockabilly tangent “Sister Madly” (“Sister madly waking up the dead / You're systematically stepping on my head”), things largely zagged into darker territory, especially in Temple’s salient shadows as cast by the opener, “I Feel Possessed,” and the ill-omened “Into Temptation.”

The mercurial “Possessed” sets up a bizarro parallel world that turns on its head the lovey-dovey moon-in-June notions of walking on air or being on cloud nine — more accurately conjuring an every-which-way-but-lucid keystone-kop concept of walking on cloud nine, then falling off slapstick-style.

Whenever you invade my home
Everything I know flies out the window
It's above you and beyond me too
I don't want an explanation
But I'll be there when you bring the house down
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Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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