SONG: "1492" - Counting Crows (Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, 2008)
In recent times I’ve found myself in a bit of a quandary when asked to name my favourite albums.
Somewhat harshly ranked #33 in Q magazine’s list of all-time Guilty Pleasures, Counting Crows’ 1993 debut August and Everything After was always, always my favourite record. Naysayers be damned - with its rootsy orchestration (recorded in a big house - just like The Band!), gut-wrenching sentiments (“Time and time again / I can’t please myself…” – right on!) and a healthy dollop of melancholy (two songs with the word ‘Rain’ in the title!), what the hell was there not to love?
Well, plenty, as it happens. I bought the double-disc Special Edition of the album recently and it still holds up incredibly well, but there’s been a disheartening trend in Counting Crows’ subsequent output that’s seen them edge gradually further away from the band I fell hook, line and sinker for all those years ago. Would the sorry likes of New Frontier ever have been allowed to slip past the quality-control barrier back in the day? Would Amy Grant have been allowed to belch a few ill-advised “Bap-bap-bop”s over the likes ofSullivan Street
Frontman and chief ornithologist Adam Duritz recently came clean about his history of mental illness and the struggles with prescription medication which caused his dramatic weight-gain over the past decade. These revelations put a rather problematic spin on their latest record, which I admit makes me feel rather bad about glibly dismissing it as the ramblings of a boozed-up middle-aged model-fucker upon first listen. Indeed, since learning more about the album’s genesis I’ve felt compelled to go back and listen to it afresh from the point of view of the artist’s intention: a portrait of Duritz slowly losing his mind and attempting to get it back again. Be warned though - this is an album you’ve got to really want to love.
Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings’ spiritual kin is clearly Recovering the Satellites, the band’s bruised and bloodied sophomore effort which their singer frequently cites as their greatest achievement. Like that album, Saturday Nights totters woozily from one track to the next and buzzes with the disorienting hum of a sickly adhesive. It’s a more obviously lived-in record than the sugary pop of 2003’s Hard Candy, and a conscious attempt to return to both the live group dynamic and emotional honesty of their early work.
There’s a snag though: it’s just not that great. As suggested by the band’s ambitious but frequently infuriating habit of modifying their own material mid-performance, the songs here often ramble formlessly in a futile quest for melody and structure. Constantly teetering on the brink of all-out anguish, as a concept album it’s also fairly uninspired – the first half mostly lacks the exuberance required to set up Side Two’s broken comedown, which drifts by in a haze of twinkling pianos, shuffling acoustics and half-finished balladry. That it’s eventually enlivened solely by closing track Come Around (itself a rather lazy retread of A Murder of One) to me speaks volumes for the band’s collective lack of inspiration.
To be quite honest – and it really does pain me to say this about a group I used to cherish so dearly – but for all the empathy you want to feel for the man, it’s actually getting pretty tedious to listen to Duritz bang on about how his “dizzy life is just a hanging tree”. Whereas the singer used to cloak his insecurities in layers of poetic imagery, nowadays his confessionals have a tendency to sound more like the self-indulgent clatterings of a man given way too much creative leeway. Taken as a whole, the record suffers from the exact same problem that blighted Damien Rice’s 9 – while I’m an avid supporter of honesty in music, the relentless onslaught of naked outpouring is all just a little too much to bear. Indeed, when coupled with the band’s diminishing capacity to construct anything resembling a tune (they badly need David Bryson or T-Bone Burnett to grab hold of the reigns and steer them back on course), it makes for a rather drab and depressing affair that’s closer to Ryan Adams’ abortive “masterpiece” Love is Hell than anything in the Crows’ otherwise palatable back catalogue. All things considered, there’s just not a whole lot to love here.
There is, however, one track on the album which rises high above the firmament to prove itself the equal of any song from their glorious heyday. Opening rocker 1492 is the song in which Duritz inadvertently captures everything he fails so heroically to convey on the rest of the LP – the squalor, the degradation, the heady rush of stumbling from bar to bar blind drunk on a cocktail of euphoria and self-disgust. Whereas many of the album’s lyrics take the form of straightforward first-person confessional, here Duritz wraps himself in metaphor once again as he reconfigures the history of America into his own quest for meaning and identity: “I’m a Russian Jew American / impersonating African, Jamaican…”, he slurs violently before throwing himself headlong into “the dark Italian underground, of disco lights and disco sound / of skinny girls who drink champagne, and take me on their knees again”. Pitching himself as a pathetic modern-dayColumbus
Not since Angels of the Silences have the band rocked this hard or scraped such towering emotive heights. Rough, ragged and topped off by the most expressive, tumbling exhalations this side of the lacerating howl which opened Weezer’s Pinkerton (an entirely more successful exercise in public flagellation), 1492 is frantic, exhilarating and quite possibly the best thing Counting Crows have ever done. It is magnificent. It’s so good, in fact, that it proved the album’s lone saving grace in meeting a premature fate at the hands of eBay.
Having given them the benefit of the doubt (let’s face it, any band capable of conjuring something as magical as Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby deserves a second chance once in a while), I decided to let the album settle before going back and giving it one last shot. Sure enough, it’s a tough listen, but I’m slowly coming around to accepting its flaws as part of one man’s rocky road to recovery. Reprieve granted for the time being, Duritz. Just, y’know, a bit more discretion next time around …
Somewhat harshly ranked #33 in Q magazine’s list of all-time Guilty Pleasures, Counting Crows’ 1993 debut August and Everything After was always, always my favourite record. Naysayers be damned - with its rootsy orchestration (recorded in a big house - just like The Band!), gut-wrenching sentiments (“Time and time again / I can’t please myself…” – right on!) and a healthy dollop of melancholy (two songs with the word ‘Rain’ in the title!), what the hell was there not to love?
Well, plenty, as it happens. I bought the double-disc Special Edition of the album recently and it still holds up incredibly well, but there’s been a disheartening trend in Counting Crows’ subsequent output that’s seen them edge gradually further away from the band I fell hook, line and sinker for all those years ago. Would the sorry likes of New Frontier ever have been allowed to slip past the quality-control barrier back in the day? Would Amy Grant have been allowed to belch a few ill-advised “Bap-bap-bop”s over the likes of
Frontman and chief ornithologist Adam Duritz recently came clean about his history of mental illness and the struggles with prescription medication which caused his dramatic weight-gain over the past decade. These revelations put a rather problematic spin on their latest record, which I admit makes me feel rather bad about glibly dismissing it as the ramblings of a boozed-up middle-aged model-fucker upon first listen. Indeed, since learning more about the album’s genesis I’ve felt compelled to go back and listen to it afresh from the point of view of the artist’s intention: a portrait of Duritz slowly losing his mind and attempting to get it back again. Be warned though - this is an album you’ve got to really want to love.
Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings’ spiritual kin is clearly Recovering the Satellites, the band’s bruised and bloodied sophomore effort which their singer frequently cites as their greatest achievement. Like that album, Saturday Nights totters woozily from one track to the next and buzzes with the disorienting hum of a sickly adhesive. It’s a more obviously lived-in record than the sugary pop of 2003’s Hard Candy, and a conscious attempt to return to both the live group dynamic and emotional honesty of their early work.
There’s a snag though: it’s just not that great. As suggested by the band’s ambitious but frequently infuriating habit of modifying their own material mid-performance, the songs here often ramble formlessly in a futile quest for melody and structure. Constantly teetering on the brink of all-out anguish, as a concept album it’s also fairly uninspired – the first half mostly lacks the exuberance required to set up Side Two’s broken comedown, which drifts by in a haze of twinkling pianos, shuffling acoustics and half-finished balladry. That it’s eventually enlivened solely by closing track Come Around (itself a rather lazy retread of A Murder of One) to me speaks volumes for the band’s collective lack of inspiration.
To be quite honest – and it really does pain me to say this about a group I used to cherish so dearly – but for all the empathy you want to feel for the man, it’s actually getting pretty tedious to listen to Duritz bang on about how his “dizzy life is just a hanging tree”. Whereas the singer used to cloak his insecurities in layers of poetic imagery, nowadays his confessionals have a tendency to sound more like the self-indulgent clatterings of a man given way too much creative leeway. Taken as a whole, the record suffers from the exact same problem that blighted Damien Rice’s 9 – while I’m an avid supporter of honesty in music, the relentless onslaught of naked outpouring is all just a little too much to bear. Indeed, when coupled with the band’s diminishing capacity to construct anything resembling a tune (they badly need David Bryson or T-Bone Burnett to grab hold of the reigns and steer them back on course), it makes for a rather drab and depressing affair that’s closer to Ryan Adams’ abortive “masterpiece” Love is Hell than anything in the Crows’ otherwise palatable back catalogue. All things considered, there’s just not a whole lot to love here.
There is, however, one track on the album which rises high above the firmament to prove itself the equal of any song from their glorious heyday. Opening rocker 1492 is the song in which Duritz inadvertently captures everything he fails so heroically to convey on the rest of the LP – the squalor, the degradation, the heady rush of stumbling from bar to bar blind drunk on a cocktail of euphoria and self-disgust. Whereas many of the album’s lyrics take the form of straightforward first-person confessional, here Duritz wraps himself in metaphor once again as he reconfigures the history of America into his own quest for meaning and identity: “I’m a Russian Jew American / impersonating African, Jamaican…”, he slurs violently before throwing himself headlong into “the dark Italian underground, of disco lights and disco sound / of skinny girls who drink champagne, and take me on their knees again”. Pitching himself as a pathetic modern-day
Not since Angels of the Silences have the band rocked this hard or scraped such towering emotive heights. Rough, ragged and topped off by the most expressive, tumbling exhalations this side of the lacerating howl which opened Weezer’s Pinkerton (an entirely more successful exercise in public flagellation), 1492 is frantic, exhilarating and quite possibly the best thing Counting Crows have ever done. It is magnificent. It’s so good, in fact, that it proved the album’s lone saving grace in meeting a premature fate at the hands of eBay.
Having given them the benefit of the doubt (let’s face it, any band capable of conjuring something as magical as Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby deserves a second chance once in a while), I decided to let the album settle before going back and giving it one last shot. Sure enough, it’s a tough listen, but I’m slowly coming around to accepting its flaws as part of one man’s rocky road to recovery. Reprieve granted for the time being, Duritz. Just, y’know, a bit more discretion next time around …
posted by Chris Carter at 11:30 AM
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