It’s been a dozen years since Neil Finn’s last solo album, but that means next to nothing. In the time between 2002’s One All and the new Dizzy Heights, the New Zealander has released three Crowded House records, one Finn Brothers full-length, a record with Aussie singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, a Split Enz live album, and a collection of songs by his global side project 7 Worlds Collide, which brought artists from all over the world (but mainly England and America) to New Zealand for a few informal sessions. Age has not, obviously, slowed him down, as Finn refuses to spend his 50s doling out event releases, intimate small-club tours, or—god forbid—more career retrospectives.
Also, Dizzy Heights is solo by default. He may get his name on the spine, but Neil is backed by a small army of Finns: His wife Sharon plays bass, while sons Liam and Elroy play guitar and drums. (Brother Tim, however, takes a breather this time around.) The abundance of family here is almost a corrective to the presence of Dave Fridmann, a fine but occasionally overbearing producer whose imprint on Dizzy Heights is evident in the fuzzy low end of the title track, the tendrils of guitar that creep out of “Impressions”, and the percussive synths on “White Lies and Alibis”. At times he seems to be as much of a guiding personality as Finn himself—or at the very least a collaborator. But really, who’s keeping score? Rather than a blah album of retrospective singer-songwriter fare, which Finn has shown he can do in his sleep, Dizzy Heights is an album of sunny psychedelia and woozy pop grandeur.
Whether it’s the narcotized R&B on opener “Impressions” or the cough-syrup showtunery of “Lights of New York”, the production gently coaxes the songs into new shapes, which makes this an ambitiously wide-ranging entry into Finn’s sprawling catalog. Sonically, the album strives to live up to its title, and its sequencing emphasizes vertiginous shifts in style and sound. Following the aerodynamic pace of “Flying in the Face of Love”, with its full-band sound and bass-forward groove, Dizzy Heights transitions into the darkly spare, deeply tense “Divebomber”, which nicely tweaks those aviation-themed lyrics. As the song lifts off, Finn’s only accompaniment is the sound of jet engines, a literal but effective manifestation of the song’s central metaphor. Musically, it recalls some of the sound collages Pink Floyd assembled on The Wall and The Final Cut, yet the song summons a strange and specific sense of foreboding even before Finn and Fridmann unleash the bombastic strings.
The emphasis here is clearly on sound over song, as Finn and Fridmann are more fascinated by texture than lyrics or even melodies. Often the vocals are buried deep within the production, another instrument in the family’s formidable arsenal. That’s not necessarily a complaint either. An exceptional melodist, Finn is not always a precise and exacting lyricist, and he addresses only hazy conceptions of “love” and “loss” throughout Dizzy Heights, dropping a few clunkers along the way. Possibly the worst: “C’mon, baby, I want your love to be/ based in real life, better than TV.” Or, maybe “I think Howard Hughes would love to be on the internet.” And yet, as a singer he’s a strange and compelling presence on this album, with a strong falsetto on “Recluse” and loose, off-the-cuff delivery on the title track. Finn sounds best when Dizzy Heights is at its dizziest, when he has to completely rethink how his voice fits a song. On the other hand, he sounds slightly less engaged on the more straightforward tunes, which perhaps don’t offer the same heady challenges. Either way, this is not the singer-songwriter album you’d expect from him at this stage in his career, for better or for worse.
