Counting Crows - Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings

Adam Duritz, the face and voice behind Counting Crows, has mastered the art of sad-sack rock. He proved that on the band’s debut, August and Everything After, now a ’90s classic that would probably be cited as an influence by more bands if they weren’t too hip to admit it. There aren’t many singers in mainstream rock who can lament like Duritz.

But on August’s follow-up, Recovering the Satellites, the revamped band proved it could rock, too. There were still slow numbers like “A Long December,” but with the addition of new guitarists (of which there are now three), sparse guitars were replaced by surprisingly distorted ones on several angsty rockers.

It’s in those extreme ends of the sonic spectrum that Duritz is at his best. The gray area in between is where the band tends to get tripped up. Occupying that space was 1999’s This Desert Life, which failed to make a lasting impression. Hard Candy in 2002 was spotty, as well. The album had some sparkling pop songs, but Counting Crows had lost much of its visceral quality, bounding unabashedly into Adult Contemporary Land. It seemed a natural progression for the band to contribute a forgettable track to the Shrek 2 soundtrack a couple of years later.

Which brings us to Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, a promising release mainly because the concept of the album represents what the band usually does best. The record is divided into two parts: Saturday Nights features uptempo rockers produced by Gil Norton (Foo Fighters, The Pixies), and Sunday Mornings, produced mostly by Brian Deck (Iron and Wine, Josh Ritter), represents the more mellow side of Counting Crows.

Saturday Nights kicks off mightily with “1492,” establishing the edgy feeling of side A with a tune in the vein of Satellites’ “Angels of the Silences,” complete with a spot-on guitar solo during which Duritz lets loose a Dave Grohl-style scream. The frustrated lyrics fit the unchained mood of the song as Duritz cries out, “I am the king of everything. I am the king of nothing.”

As usual, the solipsistic songs find Duritz hurling himself toward various forms of self-destruction, especially on the Saturday Nights material. He never pretends to have anything completely figured out, particularly in regards to matters of faith. On “Sundays” he sings, “I don’t believe in anything.” But on “Cowboys,” the strongest song on the album, he backpedals, saying, “I’ll wait for you where Saturday’s a memory, and comes to gather me into the arms of God, who’ll welcome me because I believe.”

Side B, Sunday Mornings, mostly fails in its attempt to capture the hangover of the previous night, instead feeling like a second-rate repackaging of former Counting Crows songs. Part of that is Duritz’s predictable phrasing and word choice that feel way too familiar. In “Washington Square,” he elongates “songbirrrrd” just like “sunburrrrn” from “Raining in Baltimore” and refers to a “blanket of stars” just like the “blanket of starlight” from “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby.” The repetition of “Can you see me” in “Insignificant” evokes “Have You Seen Me Lately?” all too much.

The most blatant lyric recycling is found on “I Dream of Michelangelo,” which comes from a line found in “Angels of the Silences.” While certainly intentional, it also smacks of a transparent attempt to reclaim the band’s former glory. That disingenuous feeling, combined with some lazy songwriting, makes these slower tunes overly sentimental rather than moving. And Duritz’s tendency to reach for an emotional peak by repeating phrases has worked in the past, but on these tunes it often dampens the impact instead. The ad nauseam “Come back to me” at the end of “On a Tuesday in Amsterdam Long Ago” is a classic case of Duritz overdoing it.

So the promise of a dichotomized album with two equally powerful parts is never fully delivered. But if you want to play producer and take it all apart, Saturday Nights would make a fairly solid EP on its own, and for a laid-back coda to help it go down easy, just tack “Le Ballet D’or” on the end. Nobody wants a hangover to last too long, anyway.