Finn Brothers – Won’t Give In
The first single from Tim & Neil Finn’s recent Everyone Is Here album, “Won’t Give In” is accompanied on this CD single by a couple of songs that, perhaps, lend a little bit of insight into why that album was essentially recorded twice.
The lead single itself is, naturally, the same as what appears on the album, no surprises there. The real gem of this three-track CD is “Way Back Down”, a Neil-heavy number with some fun lyrics and interesting musical structure that just begs for a singalong. “Way Back Down” was produced by Mitchell Froom, the Crowded House producer who worked with the Finns to rerecord all but one of the tracks for Everyone Is Here almost from scratch. As catchy as it is, I’m surprised that this song didn’t make the cut for the album itself; I could actually nominate a song or two whose place it could’ve taken.
“Almost” means that some elements, especially the occasional orchestral backing arrangement, was salvaged from the original sessions produced by the legendary Tony Visconti. The second non-album B-side featured here, “Sunset Swim”, is a survivor of those original sessions, and it’s a laid-back, folky number with some interesting, singing-in-the-round elements to it. Interestingly, the one Visconti-produced track to survive on the album itself was the slickly-produced “Disembodied Voices”, which didn’t sound out of step with the Froom-produced tracks. “Sunset Swim”, on the other hand, is loose enough that it almost hearkens back to the 
original Finn Brothers album – and whether the artists or their label made the decision, one gets the feeling that someone wanted to avoid that comparison.
An interesting trio of songs, this one – it’s worth it just to hear “Way Back Down”.
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- Won’t Give In (4:18)
- Way Back Down (4:12)
- Sunset Swim (3:50)
Released by: Parlophone / EMI
Release date: 2004
Total running time: 12:22
those titles together are an interesting study in television scoring in the 1970s. If you’re more accustomed to the modern-day John Williams/Jerry Goldsmith school of film scoring, there are passages here that will trip your trigger, and just as many that you’ll want to skip. But it’s definitely worth a listen. Barry Gray seemed to know better than anyone what the dramatic thrust of Space: 1999 was, and this CD is the proof.
You’ll probably remember about a year ago when I was yammering on about my disappointment with Fleetwood Mac’s Say You Will, the first studio album in some 15 years with both Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham on board – but also the first studio album in many more years without Christine McVie. When I heard Friend, the first single from McVie’s first post-Mac solo album, I thought to myself “Ah, so that’s where the real Fleetwood Mac sound went – Christine took it with her!” After listening to the entire album from which that song springs, though, one wonders if that train of thought doesn’t run in both directions.
In 1998, alt-pop rising star Ben Folds took a breather from the then-hugely-successful Ben Folds Five to cook up a side project, more for fun and experimentation than anything, called Fear Of Pop. Two tracks on that album were basically spoken-word poetry/rants set to music, with the poetry honors done by none other than William Shatner of Star Trek fame. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean than Ben’s a dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie, but he has at least copped to an admiration for Shatner’s previous album of music/poetry, The Transformed Man. And lo and behold, enough mutual admiration emerged between Folds and Shatner to spark this little CD called Has Been.
Face it, nostalgia for the 80s is back in. Old arcade games are being repackaged in battery-powerered, self-contained joysticks and sold to us one more time. TV shows from over 20 years ago are hot commodities on DVD. And bands are rising from the ashes of the new wave movement that met its ignominious end with the rise of the hair band era.
If you need evidence that there’s still a “wandering minstrel,” for lack of a better term, out there in the increasingly studio-bred world of music, allow me to present 
I can’t possibly say something about the provenance and evolution of this album that hasn’t been said elsewhere, and I don’t have the musical knowledge to critique it professionally, so I won’t try. I will, however make a few observations from the perspective of a music lover.
I’ve listened to Around the Sun at least a couple of times a day since the week before it came out, thanks to an online preview stream provided by REMhq.com. It’s lucky for you that I had that much lead time, or else you’d be reading one cranky review right now. This is a slow and subtle album, perhaps too much so for its own good, and there are a few songs that remain outright disappointments. But those repeated listenings have shown me that many of these songs are quite powerful in their simplicity and that Around the Sun is a worthwhile, although flawed, album.
Frank K. is back in the house, and this time he’s kicking the doors down and knocking the walls flat. Unlike his solo debut Morphscape, Rocktronic is a little more similar stylistically from track one to track ten. And that’s cool – I loved some of Morphscape‘s more off-the-wall offerings like “Gonna Rock Yo Body” and “Cosmic Lounge”, but if Rocktronic proves anything, it’s that Frank Klepacki’s always got more musical ideas rattling around. And for those of us who learned about his music through his hard-driving accompaniment to some classic Westwood computer games (and I’d hazard a guess that this category probably includes almost everybody reading this), Rocktronic is homecoming week for you – it easily lives up to its name.