Liam Finn – I’ll Be Lightning
It’s never fair to compare a prominent musician’s progeny to the source material. That’s hard to avoid, though, with Liam Finn, considering his unmistakable vocal likeness to father Neil of Crowded House, who invited his son to open the U.S. dates of the band’s reunion tour last year. Liam’s debut disc is full of simple and carefully constructed popcraft that wouldn’t sound far removed from the albums he likely heard made around the house.
I’ll Be Lightning is the quintessential laptop record, with looped rhythm tracks, vocal enhancements and a trick bag of sonic quirks married to simple guitar strumming. One song title suggests a mission statement — “Music Moves My Feet” — and so too the album is anchored by bustling beats that drive home compact rockers (“Lead Balloon”) and chamber pop (“Better To Be”) meant to kick you off your seat. Finn, who plays most of the instruments, layers his vocals to imitate a children’s choir (“Lullaby”), Elliott Smith (“Fire In Your Belly”), or all those robed zombies in the Polyphonic Spree (“I’ll Be Lightning”).
The disc is overly long at nearly an hour, but it’s bottom-loaded with more luxurious songs, even if they’re less hummable. The numbing psychedelics of “Wide Awake On The Voyage Home” melt around Finn’s vocal malaise: “Everyone living as one/One morning to breathe/I knew that this day will come/It’s such a permanent feeling.” “This Place Is Killing Me” breaks out into an unkempt, distorted stomp, but otherwise these songs are caked in so much vocal puff, they leave little aftertaste.