Vinyl Tap: Crowded House - Temple of Low Men - Page 2

I hardly know which way is up
Or which way down…
“Lose yourself when you linger long,” passes a refrain in the insidious five-minute-plus brood-over about infidelity, “Into Temptation.” Almost completely contained within the seemingly effortless entrancement of Finn’s mellifluously understated vocal nuance is an anticipatory, subtly-building musical dread and sense of emotional overload and mental discombobulation as the Sirens pull him in closer and closer:

A muddle of nervous words
Could never amount to betrayal
The sentence is all my own
The price is to watch it fail
As I turn to go
You looked at me for half a second
With an open invitation for me to go
Into temptation
Knowing full well the earth will rebel

Into temptation
Safe in the wide open arms of hell...

As if to make up for all of the angst, anxiety, and alienation scattered or helicopter-dropped over the course of the previous nine tracks, Temple of Low Men’s closer, the gorgeous “Better Be Home Soon,” ends the album on a comparatively positive note, or at least a more stoic one, as Crowded House finds a silver lining of resilience, of finding something so strong within: “It would cause me pain / If we were to end it / But I could start again / You can depend on it.”

In other words, dream on - it’s over.

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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