Album from 2014
When I was deciding which album to choose for the first week of this little adventure, I had a couple of options. See, I wanted to get it done as soon as possible, so I decided to pick a 2014 album that I already owned, and, for this time, at least, skip the process of going to a store to pick up a new own. So, basically, it was between "Swimming Time," by Shovels & Rope, "Somewhere Under Wonderland," by Counting Crows, "Get Hurt," by the Gaslight Anthem, and "Lights Out," by Ingrid Michaelson. Now, as much as I would like to talk up a band that's still relatively new and unheard of like Shovels & Rope, and talk about how I just saw them three times in the past week, and as much as I'd like to examine the distinct difference between Ingrid Michaelson's new album and her past music, and as much as I'd like to write about a local (for me) band like the Gaslight Anthem, it's gotta be Counting Crows.
Now, I know its really not cool to like Counting Crows, and Adam Duritz has a whiny voice and he's totally over-earnest and cheesy and whatever else. I can see how someone might think that. I've rolled my eyes at Adam more than once at a concert or just listening to a live recording.
But in my mind its better to be too much of a good thing that too much of a bad thing. Being too sentimental and earnest is better than being too jaded and closed off. Maybe trying too hard is enviable if you're wearing vintage clothing and a beanie, but it's still always cooler than not trying hard enough.
Plus, once you get past that, there's some fantastic music.
"Somewhere Under Wonderland" (2014) comes to us two years after "Underwater Sunshine" (2012), a covers album, and six years after "Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings" (2008), a pseudo-concept album split into two parts. And really I've been waiting for this album since well before that, probably 2006, when I was a freshman in high school and first started really listening to the band. It's not that those two albums weren't good. I liked listening to "Underwater Sunshine" a lot, just hearing Adam's voice doing new things that weren't really bad fan recordings was a boost, but a covers album, no matter how many Dawes B-sides are on it, is still just a covers album. And "Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings" just felt really disjointed. With my favorite artists, I can name most of their albums in order, and with my favorite-er artists I can name all the songs on each album, but I just did a test and off the top of my head I only got eleven out of fourteen, and I couldn't tell you the order. I did get almost all of the "Saturday Nights" songs, which are the more harder rocking songs, with "1492" being one of the most hardcore guitar licks to open a Crows song, probably more so than "Angels of the Silences." The concept was that the first half of the album was Saturday night, what with all of the sinning and drinking, transvestite prostitutes and Circle-K killers, late night tacos and disco lights, and racing tempos and squelching Adam Duritz's. The "Sunday Mornings" portion, while containing one of my favorites, "When I Dream of Michelangelo," was less memorable to me, and as a whole, this repenting and hungover part of the album felt disjointed and had less flow and cohesion to me than, say, "August and Everything After," or for the non-Crows fans, Costello's "My Aim is True," or Springsteen's "Born to Run." I don't know how to explain the cohesion, except that when you're listening to one of those albums, and the first song ends, you know exactly the way the next song starts in your head. Or, even better, when you just listen to one of the songs off those albums in like a bar or at a party and it ends, you are a little thrown off when the next one doesn't start.
This really is just a long-winded way of saying that this album didn't quite stick in my head. It has some really nice songs, but it's a little long and its halves are a little too different to really just sit down and listen to it. "Saturday Nights" is a little bit too revved up with no place to go, and "Sunday Mornings" is a little bit too slow to ever get there. "Somewhere Under Wonderland" is a cohesive album. I pre-ordered the vinyl and got the first track, "Palisades Park" as an mp3 download, and had been listening to it in the weeks leading up to the album release. I'd like to start with talking about this one because even though my primary experience with it so far has been in my car, it's a really great sounding song when it's coming off that needle. There's a short film that betrays the meaning of the song, but not too forceful to turn me off. When I first started listening to it, I was a little bit worried that these slow, meandering piano chords and this trumpet being played from what sounded like the room next door, were going to signal a slow and contemplative album, with music like the "Sunday Mornings" tracks, or more specifically, "Chelsea," from the live album "Across A Wire." This isn't necessarily a problem, but the Crows are at their best when they're somewhere in between jumping and sleeping, when they're just good, solid, R.E.M. plus Van Morrsion times Bob Dylan to the Big Star-th power (don't check that math). Which is probably the problem I had with "SN&SM," is that it split all of these things up into separate tracks and played them at separate times. About a minute and eighteen seconds into "Palisades Park," I felt really good about this upcoming album. The song is somewhat up-and-down, and at almost eight-and-a-half minutes, is a pretty ballsy first single. With this song, they're basically resigning themselves to almost no radio play. But it's really good.
The story of the song, told through Duritz's strikingly lyrical and almost non-sensical words, is about a cross-dressing teenager from the point of view of his childhood friend. Beginning with a Springsteen-esque first two verses that dip in and out of boxing legends Jim Jeffries and Jack Johnson, pinball machines, and a coaster ride, the song takes its time setting up the friendship between the two boys, credited in the video as Ed and Andy. The second and third verses continue on in this way, as does the chorus, until we eventually get to the fourth verse, where Andy is "dressed up in a pirate vest, all leathers and feathers and pearls," sitting below Ed's bedroom window trying to get him to climb down, which leads to what I believe to be the best part of the song:
"'Come outside, climb out your bedroom window
Shimmy down the fire escape and say goodbye.
Come outside,' Andy says, 'I'm dressed up just like Edie,
Changing all the time, my leopard spots to polka dots, just say goodbye
Come outside, where maybe we can move to California,
Just meet me at the subway, and say goodbye
Come outside, the cops all think we're crazy
If you steal, just get married
To a girl who'll never know you and then say goodbye."
The rest of the song continues on with a pronoun change when referring to Andy, singalling both the change in his friend, and a certain amount of respect shown to him, referring to the gender that he wishes to be reffered to as: "Hey man, have you seen Andy?/I lost her in the cirque," "I don't know where she's gone," etc.
The pronoun change is also important because, while the story of the song is a lost friendship, it implies that there is no loss because of anything specific, except for life, and other outside factors. The narrator of this song accepts the pronoun change and continues using it, but still tells us about how they've grown apart, and how someone like Andy, cross-dressing in the '70s, could slip through the cracks of life, shunned by a discerning society.
On the turntable, the rest of this album really explodes, as there's a certain sound to it, like someone screaming into a microphone from a couple feet away, as if it's as grand as it can get without actually being uncomfortably loud. Adam seems to be in full Liam Gallagher mode here, with plenty of lyrics sounding beautiful, but not exactly having any apparent meaning. I haven't done much research or thought about it much, but I haven't been able to figure out what an "Earthquake Driver." I love the song, and the guitar to begin the song almost doesn't even sound like a Counting Crows song.
"Dislocation" taps into Duritz's famous mental illness, and the lyrical dissociation in the song underlines the idea of going through life with a dissociative disorder. The first verse is full of such odd connections and words that it's almost off-putting:
"I was an alien in utero,
Somehow missed New Mexico
Fell to Earth in Baltimore, I know.
Now they lay case in empty rooms,
Birthday cards and red balloons
And me, I know, I know, I know, I know.
I invited Johnny Legs and Jackie-O
Empty parties filled with people I don't know."
The albums other single, and one that's been getting a lot of attention in certain circles has been "Scarecrow," but I have to admit it's probably my least favorite song on the album. It's a song I do like a lot, specifically a run of lyrics such as "It's a memory play/where the memory fades/into pictures you took/into records we played," but there's just something about the chorus that I can't get a handle on. The words seem almost chosen at random, and I can never remember what he's going to say next, with each chorus basically just being a different version of this collection of words and phrases: "scarecrow, snowman, sideshow, Buffalo, John Doe, punk rock video, spaceman, peepshow, freakshow," and the "do-do-do"-ing reminds me too much of the end of "Anyone But You," which is one of my least favorite of their songs.
"Cover Up the Sun" might be my favorite song on the album, as they really tap into the country music side of their influences. The chorus is lovely, and the song even features this wordplay gem: "She keeps the chapel pris- if not Sistine."
"Possibility Days" features less than stellar lyrics and a slow-moving tempo that almost brings the song into the melodramatic range, but the song picks up to end the album on a pretty strong note. It's almost like one of those really simple phrases that when you think about them at a really basic level, can strike you the right way, like, for me, I've always been really affected by the Goo Goo Dolls' "I don't want the world to see me, 'cause I don't think that they'd understand." If you listen to it enough, and think about it enough, phrases such as "the worst part of a good day is hearing yourself say goodbye to one more possibility day," could potentially become better and better, but that isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
Overall, the album feels like it's all one song, but still manages to create different sounds that differentiate themselves from each other. I know that sounds contradictory, but that's sort of the mark of a really cohesive album, and also the mark of my lack of ability to explain something that you just kinda feel. I think that "Somewhere Under Wonderland" is a better album than the band's previous, and may cut into line immediately behind their two best, "August and Everything After," and "Recovering the Satellites." I also think that it would be a really great way to end their career, which is something that's sort of a possibility considering how long it has been taking between releases for the band in their second decade, Adam's ever-changing state of mind, and the music industry's fickle nature. But hopefully there's another, even stronger album coming out soon, perhaps a result of being on a new label for the first time in their careers, and a newfound inspiration from Adam's ventures into recognizing and promoting new and unheard music with things like the Outlaw Roadshow Tour, where they played with many different bands, both popular and not-quite-so, "Underwater Sunshine," where they did the same by covering songs, and Adam's own labels, which is something he's been doing for a while, starting E Pluribus Unum, which was eventually bought by Interscope, and Tyrannosaurus Records in 2007. I hope this as-yet-fictional album doesn't take as long as six years, but if it's going to be better than the stellar "Somewhere Under Wonderland," I'll wait twenty.
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