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In an excellent follow-up to their debut album, Jars of Clay continue exploring their musical strengths, while moving their lyrics into a more mature and somewhere darker plane. The cutting “Crazy Times”, though it remains within the parameters of the band’s Christian rock obligations, also seems to be a little more judgemental than the first album’s material (”it takes more than your saline eyes / to make things right”). However, these lyrics add just a dash of realism to what could have instead been an increasingly happy and condescending tone that I sometimes find irritating in this particular genre. Jars of Clay maintain their awesome gift for harmonies with songs such as “Fade To Grey”, “Overjoyed”, and “Truce”, my favorites from this album. The string section embellishments from their previous album can be heard again here, proving that this is one band that can find new approaches within the sound that made them popular. Definitely a good one.

1. Overjoyed (2:59)
2. Fade To Grey (3:34)
3. Tea and Sympathy (4:52)
4. Crazy Times (3:34)
5. Frail (6:37)
6. Five Candles (You Were There) (3:48)
7. Weighed Down (3:39)
8. Portrait of an Apology (5:42)
9. Truce (3:11)
10. Much Afraid (3:52)
11. Hymn (3:56)

Released by: Essential
Release date: 1997
Total running time: 46:08

Another musical outing for a former member of the Babylon 5 cast, In The Current is Bill Mumy’s second album on Renaissance Records, and it demonstrates his incredible versatility. From the folky alternative rock style of Angel’s Observation to the gentle, well-harmonized balled “The Climb” (evoking memories of some of the best Crosby Stills & Nash tunes), Mumy covers a lot of ground. Able to go acoustic or electric from song to song, Mumy kicks off the album with the Dylanesque “Lost In Babylon” - a B5 reference in title only. (For overt Babylon 5 references, check out “Stronger Than Gravity”, which is subtitled in the lyric booklet as “To Delenn from Lennier.”) There’s even a slightly suggestive love song in “We Could Use A Little Something”. Mumy skips around different genres like he’d walk from one room to another - and yet most of the time (though not always) he manages to evade many of the clichès we’ve come to associate with the various styles.

Bill Mumy’s not going to wind up on a Golden Throats album anytime soon. This is one actor who is a serious musical contender (and it’s worth noting that Mumy was the musical backbone of the Be Five project which was reviewed here last month).

For anyone who’s a B5 fan, a fan of good music that isn’t being played to death on the radio, or a fan of Bill Mumy in particular, my highest recommendations go to In The Current.

1. Main Title (3:39)
2. Lost In Babylon (4:25)
3. Angel’s Observation (Just Like The Other Ones) (4:41)
4. I’ll Walk The Walk (3:23)
5. The Climb (4:20)
6. We Could Use A Little Something (3:53)
7. In The Current (3:00)
8. It’s Not The Same (2:53)
9. Needed To Let You Know (4:21)
10. How I Loved My Girlfriend (3:47)
11. Stronger Than Gravity (To Delenn From Lennier) (4:34)
12. Can’t Win This Game (Bound To Die) (3:10)
13. I Don’t Know You (The Wheel Of Faith) (5:09)
14. Halfway Home
15. To Nicolette (1:32)

Released by: Renaissance
Release date: 1999
Total running time: 52:53

This hard-to-track-down title (at least as far as listeners in the U.S. are concerned) is the studio recording of an Aussie stage musical of the same name. And like the Alan Parsons Project’s studio recording from Freudiana, this version of the music from Steel City - which is often described as a Tap Dogs-style dance-heavy slice of theater - probably differs wildly from what the same material sounds like on stage.

The music for Steel City was composed by Tim Finn, whose solo career is often unjustly overlooked by constant reminders that he was once the lead man of Split Enz and a one-time member of Crowded House. Though Finn’s involvement in the music was the beginning of my interest in Steel City, it was not the only reason I was interested in hearing it. For I have a mind-bending secret, a deep and abiding love for a medium you probably wouldn’t expect me to care for at all.

I like tap dancing. Not that it’s something I do on the bathroom linoleum while no one’s looking - I’m carrying around probably 80 pounds more than I should for that kind of activity - but I love the sound of it, and the whole old-fashioned millieu that it invokes. And I’m no purist - I can handle the new-style tap (i.e. Stomp! Out Loud, Tap Dogs, etc.) just fine…I love it, in fact. I’m not a big fan of the whole Riverdance thing, but that’s because it was quite simply overexposed far too quickly. But I digress. In case I’ve lost you, and it’s entirely probable that I have, the point here is that I really dig tap dancing.

Some hardcore Finn fans may be disappointed that Tim has only a handful of vocal contributions to the album, but I was actually expecting that. Steel City is not a Tim Finn solo project, but rather a musical to which he contributed. If anything, I’m a little more disappointed with the lack of actual tap dancing on the soundtrack. The CD seems to feature the backing tracks…and no actual dancing. I expected Tim himself to make only fleeting vocal contributions, but for a show whose whole point is tap dancing, I felt more than just a little betrayed by the almost complete lack of the sound of taps on a smooth solid surface.

Tim’s handful of songs are quite nice - “Steel City” and “Where I Live” ranking as my favorites. Other vocal tracks include “Glide”, “Rock & Roll Girl”, and - surprisingly - a somewhat unplugged, acoustic version of “Roadtrip”, a song which resurfaced on his new album Say It Is So in a vastly modernized form (though this version is at least as good). Some of the better instrumental tracks are “Overture”, “Absail”, “Truss Dance”, and “Finale”.

Overall, Steel City is a curiosity for die-hard Finnatics, but for those of you who, like myself, like to hear the feet hit the floor, it comes up a bit short on the tap dancing side. A great pity - I rather relished the thought of one of my favorite voices alongside a really good dance troupe.

1. Steel City (3:16)
2. Overture (2:20)
3. Truss Dance (5:43)
4. Spirit Level (2:54)
5. Old Car (3:40)
6. Drop Out (4:57)
7. Walking (3:57)
8. Smoke Duet (3:14)
9. Rock & Roll Girl (3:05)
10. Absail (3:23)
11. Forklifts (3:26)
12. Where I Live (3:50)
13. New Car (4:53)
14. Road Trip (2:53)
15. Finale (5:46)
16. Glide (3:18)

Released by: Columbia Records Australia
Release date: 1998
Total running time: 60:42

For his first non-soundtrack, non-Finn Brothers-related release in seven years, Tim Finn’s new album Say It Is So has received surprisingly small-scale distribution through a small indie label - a far cry from 1993’s criminally underpromoted Before & After, which was released on Capitol to little fanfare or critical acclaim. The new album, Tim’s first since getting married in 1998 and having his first child, is about as different from Before & After as brother Neil Finn’s first solo album was from anything Crowded House had done.

The CD kicks off with a pleasantly Beatles/ELO-ish effort called “Underwater Mountain”, complete with string backing. Things quickly get a little stranger with “Shiver”, one of several songs which seem to be trying to drag Tim’s sound into a dub/trance/house-inspired style, with varying degrees of success. Arguably, the best of these experiments is “Big Wave Rider”, where effects and filters are piled high onto the voices about as thickly as possible. With repeated listening, I’ve actually gotten to like “Big Wave Rider” better than anything else on the album! It’s rather infectiously catchy.

When not trying to modernize his sound, Tim’s music ranges from pleasant to puzzling. Pleasant, in the form of the first single, “Twinkle”, which is easily the most commercial song on the CD, and possibly the best; and puzzling, as in “Good Together”, a nice song with perfectly good lyrics which receives an odd vocal treatment, somewhere between Rod Stewart’s early “Maggie May”-era style and a teenage boy colliding head-on with puberty. Tim reportedly used first takes for most of the album’s tracks, which is an interesting experiment, but the vocal styling on “Good Together” is just enough to make the whole song sound just a little bit off, though its rough heartfelt charm is more than enough to salvage it. The thrashing anguish of “Need To Be Right” is also a highlight. The deceptively relaxing “Death Of A Popular Song” has some rather amusing lyrics, some of Tim’s best in years. Several of the songs’ lyrics on Say It Is So were written by Tim’s new wife Marie, and I have to say that, as with all of Tim’s musical collaborations with family in the past, she does bring something to the table from a lyrical standpoint. Then again, I also liked most of the songs on Big Canoe, where the lyrics were written by someone other than Tim, a move he himself later regretted.

For the first time in many years - since his first solo effort, 1983’s Escapade - Tim’s Split Enz cohorts and his brother Neil do not make even the smallest appearance on the album. (This may have more to do with the fact that the sessions were in Nashville than any family politics.)

Say It Is So is, overall, another good collection from one of the founding fathers of Split Enz, even if a couple of tracks are rough around the edges.

1. Underwater Mountain (3:56)
2. Shiver (4:21)
3. Good Together (3:15)
4. Roadtrip (3:25)
5. Need To Be Right (4:32)
6. Twinkle (3:30)
7. Big Wave Rider (3:20)
8. Death of a Popular Song (4:23)
9. Some Dumb Reason (3:03)
10. Rest (4:39)

Released by: Sonny’s Pop
Release date: 2000
Total running time: 42:21