Published on May 3, 2004
(Editor’s Note: This review first appeared in the November 12,
1996 edition of On The Town
magazine.)
Okay, full disclosure time. No, I’m not related to any of the
Counting Crows (at least that I’m aware of). I don’t know their
manager, have never worked for their record label or producer and
am secure in the knowledge that any kind of veiled grovel for
concert tickets would be laughed off. My disclosure is simply this:
I did not approach the job of listening to and reviewing this album
in an objective, detached manner. This would be impossible,
inasmuch as I believe that Counting Crows vocalist/leader Adam
Duritz is well on the way to proving himself to be the premier rock
and roll songwriter of his generation.
Evidence the first: from the band’s 1993 debut,
August and Everything After, “A Murder of One”-in this
reviewer’s opinion, probably the most riveting, agonizingly
beautiful rock song of the ’90s (a hundred listens and I still get
chills as Duritz pleads with his battered friend-and himself-to
“change” at the close). Evidence the second: the rest of that
remarkable, acclaimed album. Evidence the third: three full years
later,
Recovering the Satellites, as strong and sure and dynamic
and literate a follow-up album as I’ve heard. The personal trials
of fame and consequent writer’s block Duritz suffered through
following the big splash made by August appear to have been
vanquished quite thoroughly.
Deriving their bluesy, rootsy sound from such classic rock
giants as Van Morrison and The Band, the Crows, their sound
toughened up a bit this time with the addition of a second
guitarist, provide the appealing musical underpinnings to Duritz’s
brilliant flights of lyricism. There’s the sadly compelling
“Another Horsedreamers’ Blues” (“Margery’s wingspan’s all feathers
and coke cans / And TV dinners and letters she won’t send”); the
bitter ruminations on fame “Have You Seen Me Lately” and
“Recovering the Satellites” (“All anybody really wants to know
is… when you gonna come down”); and, in the country-rock
inflected “Daylight Fading,” a sharp summation of the trials of
writer’s block (“all the anger and the eloquence are bleeding into
fear”).
Duritz’s lyrics, sung in a crackling, edgy voice, are full of
rain and departures and sleepless nights, of longing to be loved
and lovers who long to be elsewhere. The album’s capper, though,
comes in “A Long December,” a ringing, densely melodic ballad
offering a single ray of hope: “The smell of hospitals in winter /
And the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters, but no pearls / All
at once you look across a crowded room / To see the way that light
attaches to a girl … And it’s been a long December and there’s
reason to believe / Maybe this year will be better than the
last.”
Recovering the Satellites offers abundant hope for every
admirer of the Crows.