After 2002's Hard Candy with its hit single "American Girls," which was used in a television commercial, followed by a best-of and a live offering, it seemed that just maybe the Counting Crows had said everything they needed to and may have simply slipped quietly into rock & roll history. Not so. Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is a reminder, in many ways, of just how special this band is at their best. As a group whose debut album, August and Everything After, sold over 15 million copies, was released to such widespread critical acclaim in 1991, and was easily their most commercially successful offering ever, they are one of the few bands that still exist, let alone have a following. They sounded out of time then, with their roots stuck deep in rock's past, where songwriting craft, excellent musicianship, focused production, and wide-ranging aesthetic ambition resulted in carefully constructed, poetic, and sometimes over-thought albums. Not surprisingly, they still sound that way, and that's a good thing. Their music touches on everything from the Beatles to the Band, from Bob Dylan and Van Morrison to early R.E.M. and Tunnel of Love-era Bruce Springsteen. Don't be surprised to read and hear critics bemoaning that music like this in the 21st century has no place in the American pop pantheon. That's nonsense. The album is a kind of concept offering: it is divided into halves denoted by the title, and it has two producers. Gil Norton handled the first six cuts (Saturday Night), and the album's closer, and Brian Deck the remainder (Sunday Morning). Over an hour and 15 songs, CC dig deep into the theme of Saturday night, which just might be the loneliest night of the week, and the protagonists in these songs are devoted to obliteration, wasted desire, and isolation in the midst of a world that seems to be enjoying itself. The protagonists in these first six songs are looking for connection and community through every means necessary, but it is always just out of reach. Self-hatred, a brazenly honest expression of self-loathing, and the obsessive, urgent drive to blot it out fuel every song on this half of the recording. The second half is informed by the sick, bleary, light-of-day regret that is realized amid a hung-over dystopia that these feelings have only been stripped to the raw marrow by the previous night's excursions into pleasures and deluded ideas of meaning via looking for emotional and psychic redemption in all the wrong places. It refuses to succumb to complete despair, but it comes oh so desperately close. The set comes roaring out of the gate with urgent rolling snare drums and enormous guitars creating a pulpit of overdriven rock & roll crackle that allows the protagonist to shout from a street corner, a piss-stained doorway, or a rusty fire escape perch, at passersby who scurry quickly by, shaking their heads at the madness in dingy prophet who might just be a reincarnated Hubert Selby, Jr scribbling his character studies orally. He's a "Russian Jew American/Impersonating African Jamaican/What I wanna be's an Indian/I'm gonna be a cowboy in the end." His companions are "skinny girls who drink champagne, go down on him and drag him past the grittier side of night/past railway cars and tranny whores/and morning spreading out across the feathered thighs of angels." That's just the setting for the truth that this character lays out: "Where do we disappear? Into the silence that surrounds us/And then drowns us in the end./Where they push you out to keep you in/And say, 'Come again.' He's the king of everything because he's the king of nothing." Sure it's frontman Adam Duritz at his most unhinged and exposed, soaring above a band that understands every utterance of every syllable he's letting pour out of his mouth like poetically inspired vomit. And sometimes poetry is vomit. The brooding opening in "Hanging Tree" lays a foundation for the sheer nakedness and anger of the protagonist, who claims without irony that: "I am a child of Fire/I am a lion/I have desires/And I was born inside the sun this morning/This dizzy life of mine keeps hanging me up all the time," and this is what sets this disc apart from anything in the Counting Crows past. There is a directness here that paints vivid vignettes; pictures that the listener can take in, can empathize with -- but that's not the point. These songs, particularly the rockers on the first half, like the previous two tunes, the loose, country rock groove of "Los Angeles," the skittering, "Walk on the Wild Side"-inspired swagger of Sunday, that's tempered by the Baroque pop of Boyce & Hart in the refrain and the bridge, containing an urgency and freedom this band hasn't shown with this kind of focus. One thing is for sure: this may have been truly mainstream rock & roll in the 1970s, but in an era where the charts are as likely to place Flogging Molly and Nickelback in the Top 40, this is outsider music. The album's second half is, expectedly, less urgent, and has a more reflective focus. Though "Washington Square" is a respite, reflecting the not-quite-light-yet return home, it's a likely descendent of Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Comin' Down." It's layered with hovering pianos, atmospheric ambient sounds, a lone finger-picked acoustic guitar with other acoustic stringed instruments like a banjo, a 12-string, a harmonica, standup bass, and hushed drums, which reflect the opening of the new day as the most beautiful and desolate place on earth. It's the briefest moment of peace, and Duritz makes the most of it. "On Almost Any Sunday Morning," with its ghostly harmonica, 12-string guitar, and elemental backdrop music, the light of day becomes the most unbearable period of separation, regret, and recrimination on the album. The singer isn't looking for Jesus, he's looking into the endless mirror of the soul. That tenet of honesty that runs through every song here can make it seem as if Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is an hour

This is an import product, and as such may take longer to source stock, we estimate that despatch will take 35-40 days after ordering, click here for more information regarding import products.