HOUSE PARTY: In one song, Elvis Presley...

HOUSE PARTY: In one song, Elvis Presley is spotted walking out of a 7-Eleven. In another, a jilted lover is singing “Stormy Weather.� A grouchy God also makes an appearance, “in his sexy pants,� unhappy with Beelzebub “cause he looks so good in black.� Those are just some of the impish new delights from Crowded House, pop’s premiere wordsmiths, who return this week with a new album, “Woodface.� Full of lush melodies and sumptuous wordplay, the group’s first single, “Chocolate Cake,� zings a wealth of pop-culture icons, including Picasso, Andy Warhol and Tammy Bakker, culminating with the acidic warning: “The excess of fat on your American bones will cushion the impact as you sink like a stone.� Our favorite target: Andrew Lloyd Webber, who is described giving a concert where “his trousers fall down as he bows to the queen and the crown.�

According to Neil Finn, who wrote the song with his brother, Tim, the song was loosely inspired by fanciful stories they’d told each other about things they’d seen while pursuing separate careers (the two had been in Split Enz together before Neil formed Crowded House and Tim went solo). “Tim remembered seeing a woman eating ferociously at a restaurant in New York and heard her say to her husband, ‘Well, another piece of chocolate cake or the check?’

“It wasn’t that we were aiming for satire so much as simply putting as many vulgar images into one song as possible--and reveling in it. We had a cast of thousands, in terms of celebrities we wanted to put into the song, but we just didn’t have space for everybody.�

Still, the Finns made sure they left room for Andrew Lloyd Webber, a perfect symbol for our era’s crush of lightweight celebrities. “He’s a personification of what we found so humorous about all these show-biz types,� says Neil. “ ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ had been playing in Sydney for months and you’d always see these people pulling up to the theater in limos, with champagne and all. And it just struck us as funny that people saw that as culture. It was true chocolate-cake show biz.�