After making its mark on ’90s pop culture with the unavoidable hit “Mr. Jones,” the Counting Crows attempt to continue their streak of delightfully engaging songs into the 21st century.
After a six-year hiatus following the downcast release of 2002’s Hard Candy, the band has released Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, an album that pits the contrasting emotions of a wild Saturday night against the melancholy hangover that follows on Sunday morning.
The album as a whole sways like an engulfing mood swing as the jaunty high-tempo songs of the first six tracks (representative of Saturday night) transforms into a gentle and sorrowful collaboration of the following eight tracks (Sunday morning).
The band, lead by Adam Duritz, who is recognized more by his Jamaican dreadlocks than his beautifully evocative voice, guides listeners into foreign territory with the first flashy track, “1492.” The raunchy rant boils over with peculiar lyrics about Italian tranny whores and women who get frisky over guns in the lyrics, “I guess I bought a gun/ Because it impresses all the little girls I see/ And then they all wanna sleep with me.” Duritz’s voice, which usually reigns as the prominent component of the band’s songs, is suppressed against the obnoxious overuse of blazing electric guitars.
The following song, “Hanging Tree,” tones down the abrasive hard rock grip of the prior song, flowing more naturally into a catchy stream of lyrics about life’s fumbles that rings pleasantly against the ears.
“Insignificant” and “Cowboy” are the strongest exemplifications of the “Saturday night” half of the album. Duritz utilizes his distinctly complex and atypical lyrics to the fullest when singing “The president is in bed tonight/ But he can’t catch his sleep/ Cause all the cowboys on the radio are killers.” Matched with a slick, high-tempo, toe-tapping beat, the song graces the memory tracks of its listeners well after it is over.
The soft acoustics of the trickling of the piano keys combined with a whimsical harmonica and fluid plucking of an acoustic guitar transitions the album into its softer side in “Washington Square.” The use of a tame piano in “On a Tuesday in Amsterdam” allows Duritz’s voice to evoke a chilling bellow that entraps listeners within his self-created emotional gauntlet.
The latter half of the album digs heavily into his overwhelming themes of affliction and self-deprecation that has successfully guided past albums. Their continual use of motifs from album to album is most apparent in “When I Dream of Michelangelo,” which references “Angels of the Silences” — a track from their 1996 release Recovering the Satellites — with the lyrics “I dream of Michelangelo/ When I’m lying in my bed.”
Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings is able to conjure the same humble elegance of the band’s debut CD August and Everything After, but it remains static in its inability to prosper as an entity. Nonetheless, the album is able to carry itself along with the same genuine craft and distinct sound that had us falling in love with “Mr. Jones.”
3 1/2 stars out of 5
