If you can describe the quintessential INXS song as having a driving groove and a rhythmic guitar line, “Elegantly Wasted” is without a doubt a quintessential INXS song. Elegantly Wasted, the album, starts off with the fun, sexy rock of “Show Me (Cherry Baby)” before moving into the title track and then becoming another solid example of the more mellowed-out, mature sound INXS embodied on Welcome To Wherever You Are.

The album got mixed reviews upon its release, with Rolling Stone writing, “INXS haven’t lost their flair for making sexy, streamlined funk-rock confections, but 10 years after ‘Need You Tonight’ hit the top of the charts, the sinuous dance grooves and crackling bursts of guitar in new songs such as ‘Elegantly Wasted’ and ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’ don’t seem very fresh.” Not fresh in 1997, perhaps, but with the benefit of almost 20 years of hindsight into a Hutchence-less world, we are lucky to have them. Like KICK, they stand up because of the band’s singular “flair” for creating this kind of song, which is no longer made.

It’s difficult to listen to this album without having Hutchence’s death in the forefront of your mind. He gives looser-than-usual vocal performances on ballads “Everything,” “Searching,” and “I’m Just A Man,” and the nearly six-minute-long “We Are Thrown Together” have a touch of desperation never before heard from INXS. It could have been as simple as aging, as being two decades into existing as a band, or that Hutchence now had a daughter. But it truly does seem like they were preparing for another shedding of skin, another search for a new sound. Instead, they returned in 2005 with a singer they found on a reality show.