Who Killed the King of the Rain?

This is the rare week when of my favorite bands (REM and Counting Crows) drop cds. So even though REM through a dud at me last time with Around the Sun, I'm gonna give them a chance to win me back. They've earned that with more great albums than I can count right now...wait it's 5. I just felt like sharing my honest first week reaction to the first of those two discs. Enjoy, discuss, spit at me, whatever.

There was a time when I staked out a local music shop for their opening at 10:00am. Counting Crows were getting ready to drop their third cd This Desert Life and I had to get it here so I could get the bonus disc of live material from a concert a few years back. Rarely have I so anticipated the arrival of new music by behaving in such way. Only twice since have I shown such dedication for a band.

After the great comeback in All that You Can't Leave Behind, I was expecting U2's next album to be monumental in it's greatness. After finding out about Walmart's 12:01 policy for stocking new music, I arrived at 5 til midnight to find a line already waiting. I think most of them were waiting for the next DVD set of Friends or something. However, a few other people were waiting Bono, Edge, Larry, and Adam's newest effort. I repeated this another time at Walmart for the release of Seven Mary Three's Dis/Location. That time I had to make the dude working the electronics department tear through 4 boxes to find the meager 5 discs they had ordered for the store. Ultimately both discs were good - not great... but I just haven't felt that same need since then.

Normally I would have ushered in the release of the newest cd from the Crows in a similar fashion by jetting to Walmart at midnight. Things were different now. It felt like Adam and the boys didn't really care about new music or have anything new to say. The new tracks I heard in concert and a few more on the web created a empty feeling inside o me towards the whole affair. TDL was acceptable and Hard Candy had a few memorable tracks buried in the saccharine soaked shite that was released to radio. Although these new songs seem to be lifeless retreads of prior efforts. After listening to Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings the last few days, I find myself trying to find something good in it. A few tracks are enjoyable, but where have the music of my teens and early 20's went? None of the lyrics are particulary memorable... the album has all of the classic listen-to-for-a-few-weeks and forget about in in the shoeboxes of cds that make up my closet.

The jangling opener 1492 seems an obvious rip on their sing AOTS from Recovering the Satellites. Maybe that's because they invited producer Gil Norton back to handle the rock half of the record. What you get is mostly a hodgepodge of lyrics and themes from the glory days. None of the rock tracks really work. The band sounds pretty solid and loose, but the lyrics never go further than the superficial. Cowboys sounds better here than in concert... the live version plays like a b-side from years before, but here you can hear that nice guitar riff. No doubt that has a large part to credit to David Immergluck and with some other nice touches of guitar work later on.

"There's always something on my mind..." Well yeah Adam, it's like that for all of us dawg. I read a brand new interview with Adam on www.rollingstone.com and it pretty confirmed what we all knew about the dude: he's a fucked up mopey bastard who has a dissociative disorder and a vanity problem. He's also obsessed with his own shallowness and that permeates the record. I'm fine with that... I mean we all have problems and generally the more messed up fellows write all the great songs. For the record, Adam was quite nice and a little shy both times I've met him.

All you get on this record is clumsy lyrics like "I wandered the highway from Berkeley to Dublin..." Not exactly flowing there...and that is on one of the better tracks Washington Square. During On a Tuesday in Amsterdam..., the song seems to devolve into Sparklehorse with Duritz gently asking "Come back to me" over and over. That's kind of nice in that Good Luck way... with a simple piano accompanying it. and On Almost Any Sunday Morning you get a bit of guitar that is quite nice. The momemtum is at the end with Come Around. It feels like a track that was lying around destined to be included on some single as a b-side.

I hate to bust on the boys this much since their music has meant so much to me over the years. However, I can't be one of those people that "hangs on til they can't anymore." (credit to Paul Durham for that) Maybe I've changed... the reviews of the cd by most rock critics have been somewhat positive so why don't I feel that way? Because I've lived with the music for over a decade with the words and music providing a soundtrack of my life. Maybe it's just me, but I find the growth and direction of Jason Ross (Seven Mary Three) to have more relevance to me at this time of life.

A friend of mine said that this cd was crass and hopeless. I can definitely see crass in the first half of the album, but I can't understand hopeless. Most early Counting Crows fans latched onto that since of detachment from reality and the overwhelming feelings we all go through at certain times of their lives. Recent fans to the band seem to forget the raw emotion of those first two cds and concentrate more on the limited radio success they've had with the latter ones. You haven't heard hopelessness until you hear Adam moan out a little Raining in Baltimore. But there isn't a cut here that breaks the surface. I guess I should have seen it coming... after all this is a man who wrote that "you can't count on me."