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Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings on a Sunday Night...

I'm not sure what is up with this week, but I've been championing all kinds of unexpected music for the past several days. First it was the latest from Panic at the Disco, and now I find myself pimping the latest from Adam Duritz and the Counting Crows to anyone that will listen. Well, anyone that would ever be willing to listen to any serious conversation about the Counting Crows that is. I understand that they aren't exactly the hippest band to cop to enjoying, but I can't easily dismiss the hours of enjoyment I took from their first couple of albums. August and Everything After still stands as a damn fine debut for any band and is one of those full-lengths that was instrumental in my burgeoning appreciation of the "album" as a conceit larger than a collection of radio singles and some "other songs". Recovering the Satellites built on my appreciation of the band, thanks mainly to the maudlin yearnings of Duritz matching up nicely with a particularly lovelorn period of my life. And, even though I didn't return to it as often as the first pair, I'll still defend This Desert Life as a decent album. Beyond that... the band pretty much lost me as they ventured into the 2000s. Firing off a lead single that featured Sheryl Crow on vocals pretty much guaranteed that I wouldn't care about the new album, but forcing me to hear their abortive take on Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" every other hour clinched it - I was so over this band. I did give Hard Candy a fair shot our of loyalty, but apart from a couple tunes I really didn't care much for it. Then came the nail in the coffin, "Accidentally in Love". Thanks to an obnoxiously blatant hook and placement in the insanely popular Shrek 2, this song has been unavoidable for the past four years. I absolutely despised the song and hearing it so often even kept me from going back to the bands' releases that I had once loved.

So when I heard rumblings on a new album, their first studio release since 2002, I distinctly remember shrugging and clicking through to another blog. Last week I found myself stuck at work with a dead iPod battery, nothing to listen to, and a website streaming the album - so I figured, what the hell. "1492" grabbed me right from the start, one of the most rocking songs the band has put out since "Einstein on the Beach (For An Eggman)" and things only got better from there. The disc is divided into two sections, with the first six tracks forming the more upbeat Saturday Nights section and the final eight the more introspective Sunday Mornings portion. The first half is surprisingly solid, with Duritz tossing out some great songs about the disenchantment and ennui one encounters on a Saturday night. But the album really starts to shine when he sinks back into the melancholy mire that is his bread and butter throughout the second half, "Washington Square" was a particular standout for me.

This won't convert those who've hated the band all along, but anyone who wrote them off over the past couple of albums should give this thing a fair shot. Check out some of the highlights below:

Counting Crows - "1492" (taken from Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings)
Counting Crows - "Washington Square" (taken from Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings)
Counting Crows - "Insignificant" (taken from Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings)