Lolz. Okay, that didn’t work too well. I think I’ll try to stay away from the grand multi-day, multi-entry stories from now on and stick with posting random musings.

On today’s menu: Counting Crows’ new studio album, Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings.

I’m a big Crows fan. Have been since my high school roommate—a borderline obsessive fan at the time—introduced me to August and Everything After. Their music conjures memories of certain periods and events in my life like music from no other artist. I am not, however, one of the religiously loyal lunatics (they would piss me off if they didn’t scare the shit out of me—in the end it’s just music, people) following the band that believes it above criticism. Now that we’ve established I’m not going to tell you how unbelievably amazing this album is and that you’re a twit for not being able to appreciate it, we can get to the review…

Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is, on the whole, a good-sounding album from start to finish. For fans, I think it will inspire a feeling of familiarity, like these songs are ‘old friends,’ even if one’s you haven’t kept in touch with. Their fourth studio album, Hard Candy, took a good many listens for me to get attached to it (though I’ve come to enjoy much of that album), and This Desert Life still leaves me mostly cold but for a few bright spots. But the listening experience of SN&SM is enjoyable from the off, and that’s high praise from someone who generally can’t stand but two or three songs from most albums the first time I listen to them.

The album is broken into two parts based on theme and style: Saturday Nights, and, predictably, Sunday Mornings. Saturday Nights is very clearly inspired by rock ‘n roll and early 90s alternative. The sound of Aerosmith and the Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, REM, and Nirvana, and I’m sure many other familiar bands in those genres appear in the tapestry of Saturday Nights. It’s a nice changeup for the band from the pop and piano songs of Hard Candy, the experimentation of This Desert Life, and the dark rage that tainted Recovering the Satellites. Collectively, I would say that musically-speaking Saturday Nights is some of their best work since August and Everything After.

I’m a bit indifferent to the lyrics and themes of the Saturday Night songs. You could say it’s about living it up on Saturday nights, but more appropriately it’s about Adam (the band?) getting fucked up on drugs and alcohol and banging chicks all over the world basically. Some of the songs seem to lament the fact that his life has taken him in this direction. To be honest, I find this whole theme in the band’s songs to be pretty tired by now. Look, we got that you were a wealthy, famous musician two albums ago Adam, no need to beat us over the head with it. For a guy who professes to hate what his wealth and fame as brought him, he sure loves to sing about it….often. It wouldn’t hurt to get a new shtick from time to time.

As far as individual songs go, “Los Angeles” is the most immediately appealing of the bunch. A chorus that feels inspired by Aerosmith’s “Pink” is really the highlight of the song, but the instrumentation really works well for the rest of the song, until the rather silly ending. Adam’s voice is integrated pretty well with the music, a huge bonus for a song that would have been easily yelled through. Actually the album as a whole offers some of Adam’s best singing since August and Everything After. He can sing (not great, but for the style of music the band plays it _can_ work well) but he adopted yelling and talking with Recovering the Satellites and sing-song beginning with This Dessert Life—at least in the studio versions…the live versions of many of the same songs sound infinitely better because, in part, he actually sings them. There’s a good deal of “vintage” Adam to be found in this album. Anyway, parts of “1492” work, “Cowboys” is a pretty solid throwback to August and Everything After-era Crows, and “Hanging Tree” has a catchy chorus.

Sunday Mornings’ songs are more subtle, primarily based around the piano and/or slow guitar, though in places you can find some Beatles flavor actually. Not to say that there is a lack of variety, but some will undoubtedly find it repetitious and boring. Public Service Announcement: do not listen to the Sunday Mornings portion of the album while driving home late at night after a long day. This is good music to fall asleep to (not necessarily because it’s boring, but it has the effect of letting your energy and frustration ease out of you). The music is generally not as strong as the Saturday Nights songs, but Adam’s voice stands out a bit more, and since he’s on his game in this album, we get some rather _nice_ songs in the bunch. “A Tuesday in Amsterdam” channels “Raining In Baltimore” and their first single from the album, “You Can’t Count On Me,” while not being one of the more immediately likeable songs, is very catchy on subsequent listens. The gem here, though, is “I Dream Of Michelangelo.” It doesn’t compare to “Los Angeles” or “Cowboys” but it’s a good “Crow’s song.” The themes of Sunday Mornings revolve around the regret or apologies made after waking up following a night of living it up. It would seem to be depressing, but rather than being steeped in self-loathing, in some ways they reflect the release one feels from dealing with the consequences of one’s actions

Overall the balance and synergy between the singing and music on Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is some of the strongest we’ve seen from Counting Crows since August. The lyrics/themes are not terribly inspiring relative to much of their other work, but I suppose one takes the good with the bad. The album represents a respectable effort by the band from start to finish, one which fans will embrace and casual listeners can appreciate.

7.5/10

My final complaint about the album involves the exclusion of the song “Suffocate.” The live version from their “Launching the Satellites” concert is a bit too “yell-y” but a well-conceived studio version of this song would have been one of the album’s highlights. Alas, frontman Adam Duritz hates the song, so we may never see it on their officially released albums. :'(

Departing

Thursday, February 22, 2007

I hadn't slept much the two nights previous...I was too excited. Then I was scared I was going to oversleep Thursday morning so I set all three of my cell phone alarms, my two alarm clocks, and my watch each ten minutes apart starting at about 5am (I figured nobody could turn off six alarms scattered throughout the room in their sleep). I got up fine though and took the bus into the city--New York, that is--to catch A-Train at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

I had been fretting for a few days about how best to get to JFK and settled on the subway as being the most reliable. I was going to take luck out of the picture as much as I possibly could. You see, you can grab a cab to the airport, and it'll leave as soon as you get in, but it's expensive (I think the airport cabs might be up to $40 plus tip now) and traffic is a significant issue, not to mention the brain hemoraging as one watches the driver taking the most traffic-clogged, round-about ways to get to the simplest places. Then there are the airport buses. I'm a fan of these for getting to Laguardia, and they're only like $13 one-way, but then they leave whenever they show up (this, of course, is despite the fact that they actually have a schedule), have broken down (not mine, but at least one JFK bus has while I was riding the Laguardia bus at the same time), and also have to deal with the traffic. The third option was the subway. It's the cheapest--$2 for the subway ride, plus $5 to ride the AirTrain around the JFK terminals, but then I've never heard of anybody getting to JFK that way. The best part IMO, is that you don't have to deal with New York traffic and since the subways run almost like clockwork (almost) you can count on getting there eventually. I imagine the biggest objections are the cleanliness of the subway--but seriously people, the subways are fine, er, for the most part, and I'm sure you don't even want to know what's happened in the past 24 hours in the back seat of the cab you're riding instead--and the safety, which may be a legitimate concern, but during the workday I didn't see anything to cause a worry.

I actually ended up getting to the airport way too early, but whatever. I ate some breakfast, talked to Tanya on the phone to inquire about the $-to-Thai Baht conversion rate, and to let her and Chris know that I was well and truly coming.

To be continued...

My First Trip Abroad!!!


Um, yeah, so this is my first attempt at a blog so I'm not sure how it's going to come out. For the time being this is going to be a sort of post-dated diary of my ten-day trip to Thailand. My friends Tanya and Chris are currently living in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand and this was an opportunity to visit them, and more significantly, it was my first real trip abroad...yay!!! I say "real" because driving through southern Ontario shouldn't really count as a trip abroad for Americans--heck, during my few trips there in the past I hadn't even officially needed a passport. No, I wanted a stamp in my passport so I could actually prove I've been out of the States.

Okay, yeah, visiting a foreign country is hardly a revolutionary concept, but you have to understand that for people that grow up in communities surrounded by corn and soybeans, even something as simple as going to "The Big City" is a life-changing event. Oh, I've been around a bit--much of north-suburban Chicago, metro Philly, and the New York City area--but I was born and lived for almost half my life in one of those wholesome Midwest towns where everybody knows everybody else, three generations of your family live within two miles of each other, and your elementary school field trips were to farms to watch cows being milked (seriously). So a trip to Thailand might not sound all that special on an absolute scale, but it was very special to me, so now you can read about it. :-D