Tim Fin: Feeding the Gods

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating * * * * * )

There are moments during the first few listens to Tim Finn's sixth solo album when you think: Surely not.

After all, this comes after 1999's lacklustre Say It Is So - the song of that title turns up here implying some sort of continuum - and the well-attended but nothing-to-prove tour with Dave Dobbyn and Bic Runga the following year with its subsequent big-selling live album.

What's to stop Feeding the Gods being just a stopgap before Finn the elder re-enters the nostalgia comfort zone again?

So what's with this surely not? Well, Feeding the Gods is quite the revelation. It's a great, strangely uplifting album, easily the most satisfying of Finn's solo career.

It's direct, but also hints at early Enz-angularity. It rocks loud, care of American producer, guitarist Jay Joyce, bassist Mareea Paterson and betchadupa drummer Matt Eccles. It can get I See Red-fast too, but it's quietly reflective around the edges.

Through all that, it makes a virtue of - and its energy levels thrive upon - Finn's vocal performance, its guitar-powered simplicity coming with just a few extras.

That his voice is in very good nick is apparent from the opening Songlines, a track that starts a recurring lyrical theme about what it is to have so much of your life defined by music and performing.

If he's paying tribute to his muse, at least he's been repaid in kind with some fine songs - and ones not always of his own making. Incognito in California is a grandly oddball leftover from fellow Enz founder Phil Judd, which Finn sings with the passion of the eyebrow-twitching loon with the hazardous haircut that he once was.

And the wiry Mutton Birds-ish rocker What You've Done dates from ALT, Finn's project with two Irish singer-songwriters which, at the time, had the faint whiff of men's group about it. The song doesn't.

Add the hushed folk rock of Sawdust and Splinters and Waiting For Your Moment, the Stereo Bus-meets-Beach Boys jangle of I'll Never Know, the manic Party Was You and the mad epic finale of Commonplace, and the result is a dazzling 40 minutes.

It's also that rock rarity: The late-career classic. Surely.

Label: Feeding the Gods