The Finn brothers from Crowded House got together to make an album under their surname and it's pretty patchy. I've got a single from it, 'Suffer Never' (1995), which is however absolutely great. It's a glorious song which makes the most of both Tim's idiosyncratic and Neil's "classic" approaches to songwriting, understated and graceful with a melodic purity and a slightly dark edge which are second to none. The other songs on the single are fairly charming demo versions of songs, two from the Finn album (the dodgy 'Strangeness and Charm' and the lovely 'In Love With It All') and one from Crowded Houses' Woodface LP.
After Crowded House split for good (not as it turned out) Neil Finn spent a bit of time out before making his first solo album, Try Whistling This (1998). Unsurprisingly it's packed full of fantastically meticulous songwriting and the usual fastidiousness about melodic supremacy. There's too much of it, being the best part of an hour long, and not all of the attempts to add interest to the Crowded Houseness of it all by jamming in little bits of electronics and fuzz-bass and so on, add very much in truth. Nevertheless these are minor quibbles because, although Finn's songwriting is for many the byword for pedestrian, middle-of-the-road rock, there's no denying that he is one of the best songwriters of the old-school around and Try Whistling This is full of demonstrations of the fact. His devotion to the Beatles model is writ large across 'She Will Have Her Way' but it's when he gets away from that obvious template and uses his own approach that things really work best ('Souvenir' is a fabulous piece of sweeping songwriting with the kind of chorus that seemingly only Finn can come up with). It's all very mature, and very adult and although for some that means boring, I can't help but love the fact that there is someone still writing superb songs without becoming truly bland.
Finn's second solo album, One Nil (2001) is a little less experimental, returning to the more straightforward recording approach that worked for him with Crowded House. Again it's overloaded with material, too much of which doesn't quite match up to his usual standard, but the stuff that does work is absolutely wonderful. That odd air of nostalgic melancholy that occasionally surfaces in his work is here in spades and it makes for a warm and oddly comforting listen. All of Finn's usual melodic tricks are in full effect, and it may be that the songs that don't quite work only fail because he overplays his hand. Even so, although less immediate than Try Whistling This, it's probably a better record, less determined to prove itself apart from his previous work and able to accept, possibly reluctantly, that this straight down the line, melody rich, songwriting is really where his strengths are, and considering those strengths are much stronger than most other people's why not make the most of them?
Next should have been the free-form indie-jazz experimentalism of Eleventh Dream Day / Yo La Tengo members side-project Fish and Roses and their album We Are Happy To Serve You (1989), but it's another one that I've only got on vinyl and can't find any of on the internet's the internet, so we have to skip it. It's a great record by the way, but by God it's not an easy listen, think Beefheart at his most impossible with an indie sheen.
Now we've got an uncomfortably lengthy period of time in the company of Wayne Coyne and his Flaming Lips, starting with 1993's breakout album, Transmissions from the Satellite Heart. As an indie record determined to show off its quirks, there's nothing better than Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, but as a decent record there are many, many better. There are some decent pop songs (the reason it became popular was because of the unexpected success of novelty pop number 'She Don't Use Jelly' (they even went on 90210 because of it) and 'Be My Head' is great) but, like Coyne's personality, it's soooo desperate to show off how excitingly not normal as an indie rock record it is that it actually falls into that terrible trap of seeming like someone standing in the corner at the party shouting about how "mad" it is. It's a shame because bearing in mind that Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donohue had been in the band for the previous album, you would have hoped that Coyne might have learnt that less is more when it comes to being "wacky", as demonstrated by Mercury Rev's debut album, which was released soon after Transmissions. Nevertheless, Transmissions is good fun, and it has some truly great songs but it's just trying so, so hard that you can't help but end up getting a bit annoyed by it.
Follow-up, Clouds Taste Metallic (1995) is less ragged, less wilfully quirky for it's own sake (although God knows it still acts up enough) and in some ways the end result is a less immediately arresting record. In fact, despite its whimsical re-writing of the indie rulebook, it's actually pretty boring. There are a few nice tunes and when Coyne can get his hyperactive need to show off like the class clown under control, there are some truly lovely moments, but on the whole, even though it's not nearly as frustrating as Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, Clouds Taste Metallic, like most Flaming Lips records, is still strangely less than the sum of its parts.
The most mystifying thing of all about super-smash hit album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is why nobody ever mentions the fact that opener 'Fight Song' is a rip-off of Cat Stevens mawk-fest and Boyzone fave 'Father and Son'. Because it is. Anyway, the fact that a 70's MOR riff is one of the best moments on the album speaks to just how insanely over-rated it is. An absolute bona fide indie hit, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is in fact a series of thoroughly uninteresting squelchy sound experiments occasionally punctuated by an ironic indie-pop song. As Dan has pointed out, the degree to which the album's pop elements are actually just simple crowd pleasers, hardly any different to Will Young records at their cynical heart, is the fact that 'Do You Realize??' could make an easy X Factor winner's cover song. It seems to me that in the middle of all the tiresome nonsense about aliens and free expression is the overarching desire to have a field full of festival goers swaying along with their eyes shut to songs that, just like Coldplay's frigid tunes, mean the same thing to absolutely everybody because of their innate meaninglessness. Anyway, I'm probably just being contrary because everybody seems to love Yoshimi - there are some nice songs on it, it's true, but there's something that seems just so not right about it all....
Next up is the soundtrack to Coyne's, I quote, "fantastical film freakout" (jeez...) Christmas on Mars (2008), which is nothing more than another excuse to muck around in the studio and come up with some fairly pointless sound experiments. If the idea was to create a kind of soundtrack to outer space, then he did OK, but frankly it's simply a very anaemic imitation of Eno's Apollo and as such is almost wholly redundant.
And so to possibly the worst of the Flaming Lips many studio albums, 2009's Embryonic, which seems to me to have been a deliberate attempt to frustrate anybody who had joined the band since they became indie darlings. It's a densely produced mass of horrible fuzzy noise obscuring some pathetically thinly written songs and it drags on for an interminable 70 minutes. Occasionally a nice phrase will rise up through the murk but for the most part listening to Embryonic is like sitting in a bath of cold baked beans while someone you don't like talks rubbish at you through a handkerchief and a megaphone. Which I suppose is in some ways exactly what Coyne wanted it to be like, because I assume from the title that the sound is supposed to be akin to hearing from the womb. In any event, if that was the idea it was a crap one because this is truly horrible stuff. It wouldn't be so tough to take if there was any hint of an effort to write a tune, but there's none, just endless self-indulgence, with the occasional guest star (Karen O doing animal noises is either charming or vomit-inducing depending on your taste and what you had for lunch).
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