Poor Tim. Seems like he languishes permanently in the shadow of younger sibling Neil Finn (of Crowded House fame) these days – at the time Feeding The Gods was released, I had heard more news about what B-sides would be on Neil’s next single, and had no idea whatsoever that Tim was working on a follow-up to 2000’s excellent Say It Is So. Go figure.
Feeding The Gods, as it turns out, is both a direct follow-up to Say It Is So and that album’s opposite number. Say It Is So was recorded during Finn’s pilgrimage to Nashville, featuring members of Wilco in the session band, whereas Feeding The Gods saw Finn importing his newfound American friends to home base in New Zealand, where much of the same sound was recreated – with a few new elements.
By and large, the same rough-edged, modern alt-rock flavor was retained from Say It Is So, with the addition of a little bit of horn work (though it sounded a bit sampled to me) on “Dead Man” (reminding me a little bit of Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning”). Tim’s wife Marie continues to back him up on vocals, offering a sweet counterpoint to his increasingly throat-thrashing vocal style.
That voice gets a workout on rockers like “Say It Is So” (bit confusing and Jason Falknerish of him to put a song with the title from his last album on his new collection, isn’t it?), “Party Was You”, “What You’ve Done” and “Songline”. But the real gems on Feeding The Gods are the ballads. “Subway Dreaming”, “Waiting For Your Moment” and “Sawdust And Splinters” are highlights, as is the surprising “Commonplace”, which seems to amble along at a nice quiet pace until the chorus suddenly hangs a sharp right into an angst-filled thrash – it’s possibly the most musically challenging song on Feeding The Gods, and one of my favorites.
It’s also interesting to note that while one song title here refers back to the previous album, a lyric on that album also anticipates the title of the current release – the song “Some Dumb Reason” (from Say It Is So) contained the lyric “together we can feed the gods.”
Also included are the four music videos from Say It Is So – “Big Wave Rider”, “Twinkle”, “Underwater Mountain” and “Death Of A Popular Song” – in QuickTime form. This is a very cool feature which a lot of Finn fans will appreciate, especially since quite a few of us live on continents where poor old Tim doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting into the MTV or VH1 rotation (on those rare occasions in which those purported music video channels actually hearken back to their original mandate of showing music videos, that is). “Underwater Mountain” turned out to be my favorite, a nifty little slice of Chiodo Brothers-style animation, while “Big Wave Rider”‘s unexpected, I-can’t-believe-they-showed-that spoof of Hollywood car chases and horror flicks gave me a big belly laugh while also making me slightly sick to my stomach. The clip for “Death Of A Popular Song” also spoofs horror movies, with Night Of The Living Dead and especially the Raimi brothers’ Evil Dead films springing instantly to mind, as Tim – after suffering a Peckinpah-style death by shootout – rises from the grave and starts singing, scaring off the people attending his funeral and gradually decomposing throughout the song (!). The videos, bereft of big budgets and effects, joyously recall the early/mid 80s music video aesthetic which has sadly been lost from that form of entertainment. It reminded 
me of how much I really used to enjoy videos.
Overall, I can recommend Feeding The Gods for both Finn fans and the uninitiated. Either way, prepare to have some of your conventional notions of pop song structure challenged – but challenged in a good way.
- Songline (3:20)
- I’ll Never Know (4:58)
- Subway Dreaming (4:16)
- Say It Is So (2:44)
- What You’ve Done (3:43)
- Sawdust And Splinters (4:00)
- Dead Man (4:00)
- Commonplace (4:57)
- Waiting For Your Moment (2:46)
- Party Was You (3:15)
- Incognito In California (3:44)
Released by: Sonny’s Pop
Release date: 2001
Total running time: 41:43
