REVIEW - saturday nights, sunday mornings

i've always been somewhat of an off/on fan of the counting crows. i admire their extremely slickly produced sound, their catchy melodies, and of course adam duritz's crazy-emotive voice. but at the same time, you always pretty much know what you get with them. the mid-90s pop-rock equivalent of slash guitar, duritz moaning about how much he sucks and/or wants to die and/or get laid while referencing monkeys, michaelangelo, the moon, cowboys, kings and queens, the rain, girls, black and white, etc. and occasionally some awesome banjo (see disc 1 of "across a wire", easily the band's best record).

this can be a good thing, especially if you're a fan of the crows' sound and have been since "mr. jones"; however, for me the selling point of a great artist is the ability of said artist to continue to reinvent themselves everytime they sit down and write, sing, or play something, and that's just not duritz's game. i don't think that makes him a "bad" artist, it just makes me not care that much about his records unless i'm having a day where i just really suddenly want to hear the crows' particular brand of pop-rock.

"this desert life" was frustrating for me in the sense that it was a departure for the band in some ways, and seemed like a move beyond the material on their first two albums. but, it was generally critically panned and thus the next release, "hard candy" was like a greatest-hits of the first two albums polished with an extra poppy veneer. now comes "saturday nights, sunday mornings", not only hawking what sounds like a lot of b-sides from all the crows' previous albums, but doing so in a gimmicky half and half album format (the first half is the "saturday nights" and the second half the "sunday mornings"...sweet!). i actually probably shouldn't make fun since i'm currently doing the same thing with my LP3 project...

it's a good thing that it's been four years since the last crows' record, because otherwise it would probably be more obvious and more annoying that this album sounds so much like all the others. as it is, it's great to hear some new material, even if "new" is a relative term, and i think that anybody who already likes this band is going to love this album. hell, i love this album. but i'm going to get bored with it soon. i've listened to it five or six times already and i can feel the apathy setting in. it starts with "1492", a catchy opening song that's actually one of my favorite tracks on the album. the familiar images mentioned above are all here, along with the requisite complaining about how much girls suck...though i have to wonder at the effectiveness of duritz (who if i'm not mistaken is in his mid-40s) insisting on the use of the word "girl"...maybe that would explain some of his relationship issues. but anyway, that's neither here nor there, it just sort of rankles me in a weird way. but i guess that's my problem.

in "1492", the parts where duritz seems to be repeating himself are saved by the band, who absolutely shreds all throughout the first half of this album. occasionally he comes up to their level of energy ("cowboys"?), but there are lots of points on this album that i just wanted to hear the band jam, which i've never really felt on a crows album. so that's a plus.

you'll get about 25 seconds into the second track (after durtiz's faux "mistake" recording cough) before you feel like you've heard it before. and you have. that's all. "los angeles" would be a great track were it not for the fact that ryan adams guests on it and the opening verse progression sounds exactly like the adams great "rescue blues". being a ryan-geek i just can't get past that for some reason. the next few songs are also pretty familiar-sounding, and the "saturday" closer "cowboys" is arguably the best rock track on the album. i wonder at the efficacy of including all the "rock" tracks in a row. these are the tracks that really all sound alike, and i think something even as simple as dispersing them throughout the album would have helped offset that A LOT. but alas.

the first few acoustic tracks are interesting once or twice for their novelty, but they don't grab me by much other than a coatsleeve until "le ballet d'or" and the track after that. if you like the idea of someone strumming an acoustic guitar and adam singing over it, you'll like this part. but i liked it a lot better the first time i heard it and it was, yeah, disc 1 of "across a wire". the two tracks i just mentioned actually do a lot of different things for once melodically, lyrically, etc. then there's the closer "come around", which just sounds like it's trying too hard to be a coda song.

i like this album for the band's shredding on the first half, and for the fact that it's the counting crows, because they'll always have a little, alt-rocking-angsty-teenage-bunting-shaped place in my heart. but it's disappointing that the flashes of innovation that you hear in the albums' best songs didn't get fleshed out any further in the four years since "hard candy". i liked this album for a few spins, but after that it pretty much retreated into the crows' catalog with nary a protest.

overall: if you like the crows and order the same thing everytime you go to your favorite restaurant you'll like this album. if you occasionally record yourself screaming into a pillow and then slow down the recording for fun just to see what it sounds like, then you'll probably be a bit disappointed.

counting crows: "cowboys" from "saturday nights, sunday mornings"