Split Enz - Waiaita
#145
By Stephen Romone Lewis
April 1981
Split Enz
Waitia
Allen’s Rating: 3 out of 5
Stephen’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Genre: Pop dressed up in Kmart brand new wave clothing. You know what I mean: no eyebrow piercings but a popsicle colored t-shirt (orange, lemon, lime, blue raspberry) with an angular design on it.
Highlights:
One Step Ahead
History Never Repeats
Hard Act to Follow
Clumsy
Iris
First, let me say that I hate Don Henley.
Split Enz was labeled new wave when boomers clogged the airwaves, and any band too young to play Woodstock was pigeonholed as metal, punk or dance. Acts outside those easily definable parameters infuriated marketing departments until someone in a leisure suit came up with the catchy term for miscellaneous: new wave.
Except for their hair, Split Enz had more in common with Paul Simon than Flock of Seagulls. Songs over wardrobe. They shared their generation’s love of quirky keyboard sounds, but the quirky sounds weren’t selling the songs, the songs were selling the quirky sounds.
Split Enz were not virtuosos. Stoners never lost an evening arguing whose bass chops were more righteous, Nigel Griggs’ or Geddy Lee’s. Split Enz didn’t do drum solos. They didn’t even do drum fills. Waiata has a single keyboard solo. It’s impressive for its simplicity and whistle-ability. The only thing these guys show off is their songwriting skills.
I think of Split Enz as Dollar Store brand XTC, just as I think of John Mellencamp as Dollar Store brand Springsteen. There’s nothing wrong with Dollar Store products. They get the job done, but they’re not fancy and the quality is irregular. Interludes might be missing. Verses might be catchier than choruses. Waiata’s tunes are great for a jog or for background music while deleting email, but if you want songs with the emotional impact to make you pull over while driving, you need to buy name brands.
Waiata is the follow up to Split Enz breakout fifth album, True Colours, and like True Colours (and their previous four albums), Waiata is not a new wave album. It’s a pop album. Verse. Chorus. Repeat. Occasionally a composed interlude. Listen twice, and you’ll have more earworms than a Tin Pan Alley bait shop.
If “I Got You'' is the only Split Enz song you know, Waiata may disappoint. It lacks moody paranoia. I thought that success had mellowed Niel and Tim Finn, the primary songwriters, but listening to their back catalog showed that the get-that-boy-a-Xanax chorus of “I Got You” is an anomaly.
Although Waiata’s three singles (“One Step Ahead,” “History Never Repeats” and “I Don’t Wanna Dance”) never found the international success of “I Got You,” it’s a more consistent album than True Colours: catchy all the way to the final fade-out rather than sputtering at the end.
Cool concept behind the album’s title: they planned to release the album with a different name in every country. They would take a word from a native language in each country as the title. Their label, Mushroom, happily complied, calling the album Corroboree (Aboriginal for dance) in Australia and Waiata (Māori for “singing”) in New Zealand. A&M, who distributed Split Enz to the rest of the world, couldn’t be bothered and stuck with the New Zealand cover.
I marked Waiata Down two points because Split Enz isn’t XTC and another point because producer David Tickle set the knobs and went out for sandwiches. I added a point because there was an abundance of interesting chord changes and another half of a point because they had the courage to include two instrumentals.
In the eighties, I used to play a game like Russian roulette with the radio, I’d spin the dial to a station that MIGHT play something cool, and I either had to listen to what was playing or eat a live bug. Lucky days brought me Bowie or The Talking Heads, but, too often, I found Don Henley. No matter how many times Don insisted that Desperado let somebody love him, Desperado never did. HE NEVER DID! When will that poor, emotionally damaged Desperado come to his senses? After I gained thirty pounds, I stopped playing radio roulette, but I wouldn’t have had to quit if the radio would have played more tunes by Split Enz. Everything on Waiata is better than Witchy Woman.
https://open.spotify.com/album/2dybMZ0J4cvVdKbSsau3y1?si=U1IcM-TCRtOSKH1lfQBvSw
