As with many things in the early 2020s, this album arrived in a different form than expected. First announced in 2020, just as everyone was hunkering down for lockdown, the then-upcoming Forenzics album was said to be under construction by some key founding members of Split Enz, and would involve making entire new songs out of the catchy transition pieces that were commonly used to connect wildly different sections of early Enz songs. And, starting with the lead track “Walking”, that’s what Shades and Echoes delivers – along with something else. At roughly the same time in 2019-2020, keyboardist Eddie Rayner assembled an ad hoc band of friends to jam out some songs of their own; he asked Tim Finn to help come up with some lyrics for those. By the time Shades and Echoes landed, it has absorbed the “band jam with lyrics added later” project as well, and the result is probably better than either project would have been on its own. The band jams gained Finn as a lyricist and vocalist, and Shades and Echoes was freed from being tied down to rehashing even small nuggets of Split Enz songs.
The Split Enz-derived material is inspired – “Walking” builds upon a very brief interlude from “Walking Down A Road”, but is otherwise a new song with completely new lyrics that only briefly mention their inspiration. “Abandoned” uses the mandolin riff from “Matinee Idyll (129)” as its point of inspiration. “Chances Are” is more tied to its inspiration than most, heavily referencing the echoing guitar riff of “Spellbound”. “Empty Nest” builds on Rayner’s piano outro from “Bon Voyage”, an atypical dip into the ’80s Enz repertoire (most of the “shades and echoes” that serve as starting points for new material here hail from the band’s early ’70s art rock phase). You really have to pay attention to pick out “Strange Stars” getting its inspiration from “Under The Wheel”, or “Autumn” getting a boost by way of “Without A Doubt”, so not all of the Split Enz lifts are obvious.
The other half of the album, however, derived from Rayner’s jams with his group of colleagues dubbed Double Life, give it a whole different flavor, preventing the album from simply being a sonic scavenger hunt for Split Enz fans. “Unlikely Friend”, “Rules”, “Premiere Fois” and “Europe Speaks” are the choice cuts here, the first two in particular distinguishing themselves with vocal duets between Finn and Megan Washington (who also contributed vocals on one of his later solo albums). “Unlikely Friend” is jazzy in a way that one doesn’t necessarily expect to hear from any project that has even a partial Split Enz reunion in its DNA, and it’s the runaway favorite of the whole project.
If this had been something only for listeners who wanted to pick out Split Enz riffs, that might’ve lessened the wide appeal of Shades and Echoes. It was a wise choice to widen the album’s appeal – there are a lot of gems that no one was expecting here, and it makes for compulsory repeat listening. This album is really one of the best things that has hit my ears in 2022.
- Walking (4:57)
- Rules (3:58)
- Abandoned (3:17)
- Chances Are (3:19)
- Empty Nest (4:25)
- Premiere Fois (3:47)
- Europe Speaks (3:55)
- Shut The Door (3:14)
- Love Is (4:20)
- Unlikely Friend (3:39)
- Strange Stars (4:34)
- System Overload (3:58)
- I Spy (4:00)
- Autumn (3:45)
Released by: Warner Music NZ
Release date: February 4, 2022
Total running time: 55:08
