Neil Finn’s Latest Solo Album His Funkiest

“Neil Finn makes pop music, and good pop music at that. He can’t help it,” espouses the Sydney Morning Herald’s senior music writer Bernard Zuel, and he “makes the oddest and, to these ears, most interesting and flawed pop records when he is off the leash from Crowded House.”

Finn’s latest solo album is Dizzy Heights, his third and “funkiest”.

“Yes, you read that right – funky,” Zuel says. “Sure, he got some groove happening in Pajama Club, but the rhythm and blues has well and truly infiltrated his Beatlesque corner now.

“The upstate New Yorker [producer Dave Fridmann] is best known for adding sometimes majestic escalation and psychedelic grandeur to Mercury Rev, the Flaming Lips and more recently MGMT. Fridmann’s signature is all over the record – its high vocals, its sense of fraying at the edge of calm …”

The Guardian’s Jon Dennis gives Dizzy Heights 4 out of 5 stars.

Dennis says the album “stands alongside Finn’s many career highlights, including his beloved Split Enz and Crowded House hits.”

Original article by Bernard Zuel, The Sydney Morning Herald, February 1, 2014.