True Colours (1980)

Split Enz started as an art-rock unit in the ‘70s, based in New Zealand and under heavy influence of Roxy Music. As the Finn brothers, Tim and Neil, came to the fore of the outfit via band changes and fortunes they morphed toward pop music. True Colours is a certain ideal of the late-‘70s new wave version of pop, a complete package, all decked out in primary colors. Your choice for the cover scheme: yellow and blue, red and green, purple and yellow, or blue and orange. More combos were added later and the vinyl itself was laser-etched with the triangles, squares, and rectangles featured on the cover. It was a complete package because, in terms of the music, there’s not one clinker on this album. Most were written by Tim Finn. Two—“Double Happy” written by Eddie Rayner and the LP closer “The Choral Sea” written by the band—are instrumentals, which suggests to me a band so enraptured in love with what they can create they simply shed them like sparks. They are high points. Compare “Space Invader” on The Pretenders. On the rest of the set, the simple verse-chorus-bridge attacks with guitar breaks and vocal harmonies are classic pop music to my brain. A few weeks ago I was complaining about the Whitney Houston / American Idol warbling that now occupies swaths of the pop music landscape (e.g., Kesha), but this Split Enz album is more like it for me. Beatlesque at its most abstract, never specifically evoking them. The songs range from the high-spirited romp of “Shark Attack” to the near-operatics of “I Hope I Never,” so sweetly sad. “Poor Boy” is stately, almost majestic, with a hypnotic tinkling hook. “How Can I Resist Her” sports a great, zooming, synthy instrumental break. Part of the secret brew to new wave and True Colours is an openness to synthesizers and keyboards for textures and light futuristic touches. It was a good direction for pop music and endured for much of the ‘80s (Whitney Houston was released in 1985 and the rest is history there). I’m not sure why, but, as much as I loved this album in its time and still (and earlier efforts such as Dizrythmia too), I never followed closely the further adventures of the Finn brothers, including Crowded House, which I don’t know well though generally like what I’ve heard. None of it has ever sounded as good to me as True Colours. It is a quintessential new wave landmark, with Drums and Wires, Fear of Music, The Pretenders, and 154. One of the best.