CROWDED HOUSE GRAVITY STAIRS

NEARLY 40 YEARS IN, NEIL FINN AND NICK SEYMOUR ARE STILL FINDING WAYS TO CHALLENGE THEMSELVES, WHILE RETAINING THEIR GIFT FOR CLASSIC MELODIES THAT SOUND ABSOLUTELY EFFORTLESS

While pop may be a young person’s game, for singersongwriters of a more reflective persuasion, there’s a lot to be said for having a few miles on the clock – and the bruises to show for it. And so, to such late career triumphs as Bob Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, we might now add Crowded House’s Gravity Stairs, on which the 65-year-old Neil Finn contemplates the titular climb as: “A metaphor for getting a little older, and becoming aware of your own mortality, your own physicality”.

But if it’s getting harder to drag weary bones to the top of the hill, you wouldn’t know it from an album – only Crowded House’s eighth in a 38-year career – on which those trademark sweet melodies and lush harmonies feel as effortlessly plucked from the ether as ever, while also adding subtle new shades to their musical palette.

The opening Magic Piano is as gorgeous as anything in the Crowded House catalogue: think Simon And Garfunkel playing Pink Floyd (if Pink Floyd knew when to end a song). Written by Finn as a love letter to music itself, it more than justifies its own sentiment. Life’s Imitation, a plea for human connection born of lockdown isolation, mines our darkest days and emerges with a song of joyful celebration, while The Howl is an equally effervescent slice of jangle-pop.

Some Greater Plan (For Claire) borrows from Finn’s father’s wartime diaries for the tale of a whirlwind Mediterranean romance, complete with flamenco guitar flourishes. The trippy

Black Water, White Circle, by contrast, looks forward, peering beyond the veil into the afterlife, encouraging the band – co-founder Nick Seymour on bass, longtime producer Mitchell Froom on keys, plus Finn’s sons Liam and Elroy on guitar and drums – to make a tastefully restrained pass at psychedelic rock. Recent Radio 2 staple Oh Hi is a sunny earworm that channels the infectious enthusiasm of children Finn has met through his charitable endeavours in Kenya and Tanzania, while the jaunty

I Can’t Keep Up With You is the greatest ELO song Jeff Lynne never wrote.

Closer Night Song is a siren call to the wee small hours, which starts out sounding like 2am in an emptying jazz club, before slipping through different arrangements and time signatures, each underpinned by Froom’s own magic piano. Through some act of quantum trickery, it’s a piece that, like much of Gravity Stairs, manages to sound both playfully experimental, and reassuringly like Crowded House. Which, four decades into your career, feels like a very good place to be. Paul Kirkley