Crowded House's biggest hit came over 15 years ago--a haunting ballad that you'll still hear in the grocery store, now and again "Don't Dream It's Over." "Hey now, hey now" guess what? It's over. But the cheeky lads from down under have left us with Afterglow--a collection of B-sides and previously unreleased tracks that sounds close enough to another album for me.

House mother Neil Finn and his brother Tim have represented their hemisphere admirably. From their beginnings as Split Enz, and then splitsville into their own careers, the two siblings boast a fine body of work. They've reunited and un-reunited but have (more or less) worked together on some of the best music of the past two decades. Crowded House's 91 opus Woodface is a masterpiece and was selected by many magazines among the top 50 of the '90s.

Just as ELO were the near-Beatles of the 70's, Crowded House were the Near Beatles of the 80's and early 90s. This collection isnÕt necessarily a bunch cast offs, most of them are tunes that didn't quite fit in here or there--you can see why on a few of them but most of these songs hold their own nicely alongside their celebrated counterparts.

For Finn fans it's fun to try to figure out which album a given song was left off of. As far as the finality of the best New Zealand band to ever come up over, I'd imagine we'll still get another album out of the brothers--their 96 release The Finn Brothers is a must-own if you're a House fan.