Counting Crows recently released a sort of ambitious little project called Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings. I have been listening to more and more of them lately, and I keep liking what I have found. I asked my mom for the CD as a birthday gift without having heard any of the tracks on it, which is highly unusual for me to do.
I have been pleasantly surprised by the difference in the songs on here and what I've heard on the radio. I think almost everyone my own age remembers well "Round Here" and "Mr. Jones" from our junior high days. I have stayed away from their more mainstream pop-sounding stuff, and settled on songs like "Anna Begins". Well, this CD is a cross between that radio-friendly stuff and "Anna Begins".
The title suggests it's divided into segments, and it is. The first portion, the "Saturday Nights" is more raucous and just plain loud. It's the kind of music I get in trouble with in my car because I drive too fast. The first track, 1492, sounds almost like a whole different band if it weren't for the fact that Adam Duritz has a very distictive voice. I think my favorite of these more up-tempo songs is Insignificant. The others were good, but they sound fairly similar and I have a hard time telling them apart if I'm not paying close attention.
The second half of the CD, the "Sunday Mornings", starts off like a mellow morning after a rowdy night out with Washington Square, a very slow and pared down acoustic-style song about, you guessed it, walking through Washington Square. I have a feeling, had I ever been there, I would know what they were talking about and would be partial to this song. I like the sound of it, but it really has very little meaning to me. This second part continues in kind of this simplified vein (even using a harmonica in places, without it coming off too much like country music), but gradually builds into Come Around at the end, which is my favorite track on the CD. It's about a relationship where the involved people keep coming back to one another, and even when their relationship takes a detour they still have the trust that eventually their time will come back around.
I wasn't sure if I would come away thinking the attempt was cheesy, to capture an entire young and wild weekend worth of feeling. Instead, I got a really good CD that I can listen to whether my mood indicates 'fast driving music' or something a little mellow and almost melancholy without resorting to Dashboard Confessional.
0 comments:
Post a Comment