Still Whistling A Happy Tune Pop

The title of Neil Finn's new album has a defiant ring, but don't be deceived. 'Try Whistling This', he says, so I did. And, though I am no Roger Whittaker, it is my duty and pleasure to report that something in the region of 85 per cent of the material on Finn's first album since he decided, for reasons of his own, to bust up the very fine New Zealander pop group Crowded House, passes the whistle test.

Crowded House established many times over Finn's reputation as a man for a melody. From the sad-eyed 'Don't Dream it's Over' to the cheerfully meaningless 'Weather With You', his were songs which stuck to you like chewing gum and would not be shifted, other than by a dousing in a strong solution of chemicals. But few musicians like to be trapped with a reputation, and you could take the title of this new work as a piece of discontented chain rattling.

I ventured to the CD player in a state of some fear, worried that Finn had developed a plan to throw us off the scent by coming over all 'experimental' - as if tunes were somehow artistically timid and no longer enough. This is an anxiety which affects most pop stars at some time or other: where is the sometime platinum-selling artiste who has not travelled uneasily from the Golden Hour to an hour with Goldie?

In Finn's case, these were needless worries. By comparison with Finn, the ethnic album Neil made in 1995 with his brother Tim, during a kind of sabbatical from Crowded House, and which would be most sensibly filed under that panicked catch-all 'World Music', this is virtually an All Saints album. By the end, I was beginning to think the title must be meant without sarcasm or side of any kind, as an open invitation.

True, there is probably a greater variety of noises here than on the last Crowded House album, as Finn enjoys the giddy liberty known only to the newly unshackled solo artist - free to throw in, for example, a flute-sound without having to seek clearance from the bassist or upsetting the drummer's girlfriend.

And many of those new textures are somewhat harder on the ear than before. (Though some are entirely familiar: 'Addicted' seems to have that bright but melancholy upright piano which 'Fall at Your Feet' made such good use of.) Occasionally Finn's unfaltering and unstraining voice is scrapping for space with some gritty guitars. But all his best habits persist here, from the moment in the first track, 'Last One Standing', when the drums come in for the chorus and, right where you're expecting a surge of energy, they're playing in half-time.

Much of the album was produced in partnership with Marius de Vries who was, according to an essay accompanying the album, 'fresh from working with Nellee Hooper'. One trembles to read this: if the clammy hand of the Bristol scene can reach, however tenuously, as far as New Zealand, then clearly nowhere is safe. Two tracks, 'Sinner' and 'Twisty Bass', are most obviously the product of this union - both set around one of those fathoms-deep bass sounds, designed specifically to unsettle some of the important organs in your midriff.

Yet, ironically, the former motivates Finn to come up with one of the album's sweetest tunes. (The track is, in fact, intended for release as a single: so much for the sonic revolution.) It says a lot for the depth to which songwriting is engrained in Finn that even these noteless, dope-sozzled atmospherics can't send his melodic intuition to sleep, but instead help it on to somewhere new.