Counting Crows Return to Form
Counting Crows’ latest, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, comes just as its title advertises — a rockus Saturday night followed by easy like Sunday morning. It’s almost like two albums. It opens with guitars unleashed. Four of the first six songs are rockers echoing the best from Recovering the Satellites. Mixed in there is Ryan Adams co-penned “Los Angeles,” which is a good tribute to a mixed up town. “Cowboys” is the standout on the album. This one really sounds like it could have been on Satellites, which despite the brilliance of August and Everything After still seems to firmly hold the position as my favorite CC album.
After “Cowboys” the disk takes a hard left turn into mellow folk rock for most of the rest of it. We’re talking unplugged stuff for a number of these tunes. And they’re not bad. There’s no Shrek moments. They’re just quite the contrast to the guitars blazing through the first 6 tunes, songs that you groove on right away (which I will really want to see live); the second half of the album may take a while to set in. They’re more like “Speedway” or “Omaha” than “Chelsea,” but not monotonous, with some decent melodies. “Washington Square” is probably the standout. “Le Ballet D’or” echoes “Ghost Train” of August.
The pace picks up again on “You Can’t Count on Me,” which is getting radio play (I thought it was putrid when I first heard it, but was probably being overly harsh now that I’ve heard it again). The disc ends with another upbeat groove called “Come Around,” which is not like “Hangin’ Around” or “Round Here,” but is a fitting coda for this mix of rock and folk.
If the mellow portions of this disk don’t fall on their face with further listening, I think this album has a chance to land squarely in the middle of the heap of the Counting Crows catalog: August/Satellites (pick ‘em, both great), Saturday Nights, Desert Life/Hard Candy (I like both of these and continually flip-flop over which one I think is better, but then stop debating due to their inferiority to August and Satellites).
We’ll see. Saturday Nights at least is no worse than the last two albums and its highs are definitely higher. SIX YEARS in the making, could they have done better? Yeah, but if you’re a fan of the earlier CC stuff, you won’t be too disappointed. Duritz is going in the right direction, and losing weight, and getting the right cocktail of antidepressants. Hopefully there wil be a lot more to come.
