Counting Crows, in their latest release Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings walk the razor line between reinvention and recapturing the past. The album, built on the theme of frenetic Saturday nights and restoration -- or lack thereof -- on quiet Sunday mornings, is their first studio recording since Hard Candy in 2002.
The six years off have proved useful to the band: they return to the themes present on their first two albums, August and Everything After and Recovering the Satellites. Essentially, in terms of sound this is a conglomeration, and it carries the rock of Satellites for the first half, while resolving into the relaxed rhythms that were present on August. For long time Crows lovers, then, this album offers a return to what drew us to the band in the beginning; for new listeners it recollects the band while it was at its height of popularity in the mid-1990's.
Beyond the music, however, lead singer Adam Duritz is at his best once again. Duritz is one of the most emotive lead singers in the business, and he runs straight into his emotion on this album: emotion that saw him walk away from Counting Crows for a time after their popularity hit its peak, emotion that now realizes the emptiness of realizing your dreams when your dreams are to become a rock star.
The lyrics and rhythms in the lyrics have always been a strength with Duritz at the helm, and he does not disappoint on their fifth studio album. The first six songs are played at a harder rock pace; they tell of feeling insignificant, of realizing the Saturday night party is, in the end, empty. They are about dissolution and lack of control.
The album then moves to Sunday mornings: calm and relaxed, yet still powerful. Most notably, "When I Dream of Michelangelo" echoes a line from "Angels of the Silences" (Recovering the Satellites) and wonders what it would have been like to be Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel; drawing God touching Adam. God touching humanity. It speaks of the inability to touch something divine; it speaks of the striving to create art or music: wanting to touch God. In Duritz's words: If you can't quite touch it [God, the divine] then you forget to touch everything else around you, then you're just not touching anything.
The album eventually resolves. Sunday mornings wanders a bit as each song has someone trying to put the pieces of a life back together. Yet, the album ends on "Come Around," the final idea that even though life isn't perfect, we continue.
For a taste of this new album, here's "When I Dream of Michelangelo" as performed at the Apple Store in S.F. (lyrics below)
Lyrics:
Well you know I don't like you but you wanna be my friend
Well, there are these bodies on the ceiling and they're fluttering their wings
It's ok, I'm angry, but you'll never understand
When you dream of Michelangelo they hang above your heads
And I know that she is not my friend
And I know 'cause there she goes walking on my skin again
And I can't why you'd want to talk to me
When your vision of America is crystalline and clean
I want a white bread lie just something ignorant and plain
But from the walls of Michelangelo I'm dangling again
And I know that she is not my friend
And I know 'cause there she goes walking on my skin again and again
Saturn on a line
A sun afire on strings and wires
To spin above my head and make it right
But any time you like
You can catch a sight of angel eyes all emptiness and infinite
And I dream of Michelangelo when I'm lying in my bed
I see God upon the ceiling; I see angels overhead
And he seems so close as he reaches out his hand
But we are never quite as close as we are led to understand
And I know that she is not my friend
And I know 'cause there she goes walking on my skin again and again
