My Back Pages, Vol. 9: Counting Crows - August and Everything After

Welcome to My Back Pages, a collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

Today, we're resurrecting the feature after a five month hiatus. Chris disappeared off to the deserts and mountains of New Mexico, to the point where we at AbsolutePunk weren't sure whether or not he'd taken up work with Walter White. But now that he's back, we're hoping to get this going regularly once more. Today, we're glancing back at August and Everything After, the debut album from Counting Crows and a record that turned 20 years old this month. Listen along with our Rdio playlist, and please, jump in and share your thoughts on this album that I now feel completely justified in calling a classic.

Craig Manning: “Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where no one notices the contrast of white on white,” Adam Duritz sings at the outset of the Counting Crows’ legendary debut album August and Everything After. In the pantheon of all-time great opening lines, I don’t think there’s ever been one quite like that one from “Round Here,” still the Crows’ greatest contribution to the American songbook. The entire first verse—the entire song, to a certain extent—burns like this all-encompassing run-on sentence, like a string of thoughts and emotions and profound imagery that is never going to come to an end. In Counting Crows live shows, that’s not a bad description for what happens: this song, frequently the opener of the set, goes on for ten minutes or more, featuring long improvisation sections in the middle where frontman Adam Duritz interpolates lyrics from other songs or from his own tortured mind. But “Round Here” is at its finest in studio format. It’s best with 12 seconds of silence preceding the introductory hit of the song’s signature chiming guitar line; it’s best with Duritz left isolated and alone for the first verse and chorus, just that guitar and an ambient organ behind him; and it’s best with the vibrant emotional climax that comes with the “I can’t see nothing around here” line 90 percent of the way through the song.

Legend has it that the studio recording of “Round Here” was the first and only time the band played the song in that arrangement. Because of that singularity, we get Duritz at his rawest and most emotional, a performance with the kind of uncomfortable intimacy that is only rarely heard on record. Duritz’s vocal alone makes “Round Here” the undisputed highlight of the disc, but a similar level of explosive passion persists throughout August and Everything After, as if every individual song is the last one Duritz will ever get to perform. His fervor pays off: next to U2’s The Joshua Tree and Jeff Buckley’s Grace, I consider August to be the most well-sung album in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s also my favorite album of the 1990s. Released on September 14, 1993, August and Everything After preceded my childhood musical awakening by a bit (I was still two months shy of my third birthday, after all), but it is still one of the first records I ever remember hearing and is still in my all-time top ten. I’ve been a huge fan of this band all my life: along with the Wallflowers, they ignited my love for music as a child, and when their greatest hits dropped in 2003, they re-ignited that love after years spent ignoring the album format and only listening to what the radio threw my way. Each Crows album took the band’s sound in a different direction, from the rage-fueled rock ‘n’ roll of 1996’s Recovering the Satellites to the bright summer pop of 2002’s Hard Candy, but while I adore both of those albums, nothing quite compares to the gloomy, autumnal folk of August and Everything After.

This album somehow sold 7 million copies back in the day, a feat that seems especially significant now considering the wreckage of the music industry and the inability of any folk band that isn’t Mumford & Sons to even approach similar levels of ubiquity. A big part of that success can be attributed to the flagship first single, “Mr. Jones,” a jangly folk-rock tune that namedropped Bob Dylan and pondered what it would be like to be famous. Ironically, the song made Duritz and his band into huge stars and sent radio listeners flocking to record stores (remember those?) to pick up August and Everything After. But while there are certainly accessible numbers here like “Mr. Jones” and “Rain King,” songs with these big, Americana-laced hooks, I can imagine there were also things going on with this record that many of those buyers weren’t quite prepared for.

Case in point: last week, when Grantland’s Steven Hyden compared August and Everything After’s legacyto that of Nirvana’s In Utero (which released just a day prior to August in 1993), he wrote that, where In Utero made moments of heartbreak and disconnection “seem noble,” “listening to August and Everything After makes loneliness seem like what it really is: a small and pitiful feeling drenched in a disgusting cocktail of tears and snot.” To a certain extent, that’s true: Kurt Cobain was an icon who spoke for a generation, while Adam Duritz was the guy expressing feelings that everyone had but no one wanted to talk about. If you need proof of that statement, just listen to the lyrics. “Perfect Blue Buildings” is an escapist anthem gone wrong, a depressing-as-hell dirge about what happens when you’re hopeless and alone and have taken to locking yourself in your apartment for days at a time rather than living your life. “Anna Begins” is about falling in love with your best friend only to see that person—and the close friendship you shared together—fade away when it all goes to hell. The guy in “Sullivan Street” knows his relationship is coming to an end, but still tries to hold it together by driving hundreds of miles for seemingly momentary moments with his lover. And the sparse piano balladry of “Raining in Baltimore” calls to mind that moment when you’re three-thousand-five-hundred miles away from the one person on Earth you care about, and you have no fucking idea how to make them happy.

It’s not all desolation, of course. No sad album can truly be complete without a counterbalancing force, and this album has plenty of them. Album closer “A Murder of One,” for example, sparks with hopeful resilience, while the narrator of “Time and Time Again” ardently vows to “set fire to this city” and ride out into the desert in search of a new beginning. But throughout the past 20 years, the loneliness and desperation of these songs are the qualities that have kept me coming back again and again. Hearing this record when I was old enough to understand it, that was one of the first times that I fully realized just how much visceral power music could have, and even after hundreds of plays, there are moments here that still stop me in my tracks. I have to listen to “Round Here” at least twice before moving on to the rest of the record; “Sullivan Street” remains one of my go-to night driving songs; and if “Raining in Baltimore” isn’t my favorite thing to play on acoustic guitar to spill my emotions to, then it’s damn close. In Utero might be getting the lion’s share of anniversary coverage this month, but for me August and Everything After will always be 1993’s definitive masterpiece.

Chris Collum: Craig nailed it when he said that “Round Here” is the Crows’ greatest contribution to the American songbook. More than that even, it serves not only as an introduction to August and Everything After, but it is the crux of the album as well. Everything Duritz expresses on the next ten songs is distilled into five minutes with “Round Here.” Craig said that the “I can’t see nothing around here / Catch me when I’m falling” bit at the end of “Round Here” is the emotional climax of the song, and while that may be true, in my eyes the defining moment comes a little bit sooner. After a seeming out-of-left-field funky bridge, everything drops out again except that omnipresent guitar line and Duritz’s vocals as he almost-whispers: “She says it’s only in my head.”

August and Everything After is an album about loneliness to be certain, but there are thousands of rock records about that and most of them aren’t that good. What sets August apart is the way in which Duritz expresses his loneliness. He doesn’t just feel isolated from the world around him, he feels a complete disconnect with it. Duritz suffers from what he calls “a dissociative disorder, which makes the world seem like it's not real.” So yes, it literally is all in his head—but that’s what makes August so special. The way that he uses words to paint pictures that are in one sense very abstract but in another sense incredibly visceral is a rare talent. The opening lines of the album that Craig references are a perfect example of this.

My first experience with August and Everything After (apart from radio smash hit “Mr. Jones” naturally) was when I was 15, riding around the hills of northern New Mexico with my cross-country team. I’d end up calling those hills home for three consecutive summers a few years later, but that’s aside from the point. The van that our cross-country coach drove us in from Indiana all the way to New Mexico only had a tape player, and my coach only had one tape: August and Everything After. It was playing in the background at a low volume for most of the trip, but he’d turn it up to sing along occasionally—the man had a gloriously tuneless voice, and we’d all snicker quietly from the back seats.

Like many who have fallen in love with August, the first thing that struck me about it was Duritz’s voice. His vocals are simultaneously world-weary and incredibly full of passion, and without even paying any attention to the words that he’s saying it’s not difficult to tell what kind of emotions Duritz is trying to invoke. August is a sad record in a sense, but it’s a tender one at times as well, such as when he croons “I need a phone call / I need a raincoat” in “Raining in Baltimore.” And at its’ core, despite all the loneliness and depression, August is truly a hopeful record. The album ends with Duritz chanting “change, change, change” repeatedly because “you don’t wanna waste your life now baby.”

August was produced by T. Bone Burnett, a true legend of Americana. He adds a tangible warmth to the mix that accents the Crows’ poppy brand of roots rock well, particularly on songs like “Omaha.” That song also serves as another example of the universal appeal of Duritz’s lyrics. You don’t need to have ever been to Omaha or even know where it is on a map to understand the loneliness that can come from being by yourself in a strange town “somewhere in the middle of America.”

A lot of discussion about this record inevitably ends up focusing on how different it is from absolutely every other rock record released in 1993. That’s obviously true, but it isn’t all that relevant in my opinion. August is a record birthed in another time and place than the grunge movement and owes its debts to the likes of Dylan, Morrison and Springsteen rather than the likes of Pixies, Replacements and Sonic Youth. That the Counting Crows were able to make as much of a splash as they did in 1993 with such a different-sounding record is certainly remarkable, however. Furthermore, if 90s alt-rock had chosen the Crows as a blueprint for the rest of the decade as opposed to the worst parts of grunge, a few bands might have actually made listenable mainstream rock records post-1994.

But that was not the case obviously. Instead August stands alone as somewhat of a curiosity in the rock ‘n roll canon: its influences are obvious but it is not truly of the era in which it came out. It’s a very unique record, and sadly the Crows haven’t come anywhere close to making one as good since. But that’s alright. Nothing that has happened since 1993 would have eclipsed the glory of August anyway. Duritz got his well-deserved one shining moment. He got exactly what the protagonist of “Mr. Jones” wanted when he said that “When I look at the television I wanna see me / Staring right back at me.”

Big, big stars indeed.

Counting Crows - Somewhere Under Wonderland

“When I look at the television I want to see me staring right back at me,” Adam Duritz sang on “Mr. Jones,” way the hell back in 1993. At the time, he was a 29-year-old guy with some deep emotional scars and a lot of ambition, singing about how he wanted to be a “big, big star” on the song that ironically made him just that. Fast-forward 21 years, though (yes, August and Everything After is indeed almost old enough to drink) and it’s clear that Duritz could no longer care less about being on TV or having his name known around the world. In fact, he’d probably prefer it if nobody knew his name at this point.

That much is evidenced by “Palisades Park,” the opening track and first single from Somewhere Under Wonderland, Counting Crows’ seventh official LP. The song is the antithesis of “radio friendly”: it goes on for eight and a half minutes, ricochets through half a dozen tempo shifts, and has no discernable verse/chorus dynamic. Instead, the song hews a lot closer to what you might hear from a live Counting Crows album, starting off with an intimate trumpet reverie and ending with what sounds like one of Duritz’s trademark improvisational sections. In between, we get plenty of striking melodies, at least a dozen quotable lyrics (“Tomorrow’s the name we changed from yesterday to blame when the train just don’t stop here anymore” is an instant Duritz classic), and an arrangement that shows off the Crows at their loosest and most vibrant.

“Palisades Park” also makes one thing immediately clear: Somewhere Under Wonderland is not August and Everything After. Those looking for a set of “Round Here” or “Long December” rewrites would be advised to look elsewhere. However, listeners who are willing to take the trip will be treated to the most raucous and unpredictable album the Crows have ever made. Recalling E Street Shuffle-era Springsteen, “Palisades Park” circles through a dense, wordy narrative centered around a New Jersey theme park that shut its gates in 1971. It also introduces us to a character named Andy, who the song suggests is going through a deep struggle with gender identification. Duritz flips chaotically back and forth between “he” and “she” pronouns throughout, just as the song itself accelerates and decelerates like the roller coasters at the titular theme park.

There’s so much imagery and lyricism going on here, in fact, that it’s incredibly difficult to parse the overall meaning of “Palisades Park.” But the ambiguity is welcome. The Crows’ last full-length album of original material, 2008’s Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, was a record devoid of subtlety, a record with good songs that often buckled under the weight of the album’s own ambitious, self-important premise. With that album, Duritz was trying to create a conceptual piece that was half about debauchery and mistakes (the loud and electric Saturday Nights portion) and half about redemption and renewal (the more acoustic-driven Sunday Mornings half). He ended up making a bloated record with a tiring and all-too-literal fall-and-rise concept, and the songs suffered as a result.

Here, Duritz has taken some of the looseness of his band’s excellent 2012 cover album, Underwater Sunshine, coupled it with the roots sounds of 1999’s This Desert Life (and a little bit of the straight-ahead rock and roll that defined 1996’s Recovering the Satellites), and made an incredibly lyrical and meaningful album that rocks hard but still finds moments for intimacy. This album sounds like it could have been recorded live, from the improvisational feel of “Palisades Park” to the sublime 1-2 punch of spontaneous rock songs (“Earthquake Driver” and “Dislocation”) that fill out the middle part of Side A. Those two songs are proof positive of how tight this entire band has become over the past two decades. Handclaps skitter through “Earthquake Driver” like skipping stones; Charlie Gillingham’s radiant keys flutter in the background as the entire band joins in for lush barbershop back-up harmonies, the likes of which we haven’t heard since 2002’s pop-centric Hard Candy; and of course, guitarist Dan Vickrey gives the entire project it’s gasoline, his snarling lead guitar riffs beautifully complementing the more subtle guitar work of band members David Bryson and David Immergluck.

It’s hard not to point to Underwater Sunshine as the genesis stone for Somewhere Under Wonderland. I struggled with Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings because I thought it was overproduced; many people had the same issue with Hard Candy and its shimmering pop sheen. Underwater Sunshine, on the other hand, gave the band a chance to just play, without worrying about sounding like a mainstream pop or rock band. Part of the reason for the looseness was that the album was a completely independent venture: the band recorded it on a summer vacation, self-producing the songs and releasing the thing on Cooking Vinyl, a UK indie label. The other defining factor of that collection—that the band was covering their favorite artists instead of playing their own songs—allowed them to ditch the perfectionism that had locked their more recent records into a less at-ease place. The result was, in many ways, the first time that Counting Crows really captured the energy and spontaneity of their live show on record.

Luckily, the band applies everything they learned on Underwater Sunshine to this album, even though they’re back on a major label (Capitol) and even though producer Brian Deck, who handled the Saturday Mornings part of 2008’s record, is back behind the boards. The fact that most of the covers on Underwater Sunshine were of Americana acts like Bob Dylan and Dawes also means that Somewhere Under Wonderland is the most roots-focused album that Counting Crows have recorded since the 1990s. The rollicking “Cover up the Sun” is a sunburnt country number with a clear Dylan influence, while “Elvis Went to Hollywood” was meant for a heartland road trip, from the relentless beat of Jim Bogios’ drums to the "Rainbow Road" synths that pierce through the texture on the song’s home stretch. And “God of Ocean Tides,” the achingly beautiful acoustic number that closes out the record’s first side, is a kaleidoscope beauty which shows that—even at the heart of a pure summer rock album—Adam Duritz can still pen a timeless folk ballad.

I know I’ve found an album I love when I feel like I’m cheating certain songs by not mentioning them in a review, and that’s certainly the case here. After all, how can I talk about what makes Somewhere Under Wonderland so brilliant without mentioning “Scarecrow,” a classic Counting Crows song that could have so easily fit on This Desert Life? Or “John Appleseed’s Lament,” where Duritz resurrects Maria, namedrops himself for the first time on record, and spits out some of his cleverest lines ever (“Oh, I cigarette the winter air, then I Fred Astaire my way down Seventh Street”)? At nine tracks, Somewhere Under Wonderland may be concise, but it’s also stacked with quality material.

And then there’s “Possibility Days,” this album’s closing track, and one of the best songs Adam Duritz has ever written. In a way, “Possibility Days” is like “Round Here.” Both have this immense lyrical beauty, this poetic build and flow that feels like it’s never going to end, but is just going to keep spiraling and morphing and hitting new moments of clarity forever; new lyrics you’ll internalize and carry with you for years to come; new words and phrases that, like “Step out the front door like a ghost into a fog where no one notices the contrast of white on white,” convince you that you are listening to one of the best songwriters ever; lyrics that I’ll just quote, en masse, because my words can’t do justice to their splendor and beauty.

"You can run out of choices and still hear a voice in your head when you’re lying bed
And it says that the best part of a bad day is knowing it’s okay
The color of everything changes
The sky rearranges its shade, and your smile doesn’t fade
Into a phone call and one bad decision we made
And the worst part of a good day is the one thing you don’t say
And you don’t know how but you wish there was some way
So you pull down the shades and you shut out the light
Because somehow we mixed up goodbye and goodnight"

If you spend a long enough period of time with a band, you are bound to eventually hit a point where they disappoint you. That disappointment could come in the form of an album you don’t like, or in the shape of a hiatus that lasts too long, but whatever the reason, there comes a point in time where the bands we love the most have been so built up and mythicized in our own heads that we wonder how they could ever possibly measure up.

Part of it is the music itself: no one expects Bruce Springsteen to make another Born to Run because that kind of masterpiece is one of a kind. But another part is our own nostalgia, our own expectations. August & Everything After was the first album I ever remember hearing in full, and I am the music lover I am today partially because of the decisions I made to buy Films About Ghosts and Hard Candy at my local Borders back in 2004. How can any new material from these guys measure up to that legacy? How can anything possibly replicate the way it feels to scream along to “Round Here” when you're driving alone at 2 a.m. and it feels like there's no one else on planet earth? Or that deep nostalgic feeling I get when I listen to “A Long December” and hear “And all at once you look across a crowded room to see the way that light attaches to a girl,” arguably my favorite lyric of all time?

In the wake of Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, an album I didn’t love—not to mention the two very lengthy hiatuses that have broken up the band’s last three albums of original material—I began to think that I had the answer to those two questions. And the answer was “nothing.” As far as I was concerned, there was nothing these guys could ever do again that would recapture the sublimely personal connection I have with their first four albums, no way that they could make a new record that would make me feel the way I felt when I heard Hard Candy or August & Everything After for the first time.

It is the deepest compliment that I can pay to Somewhere Under Wonderland to say that I was wrong.

Gonna Walk Around and Drink Some More: The Legacy of The Hold Steady and the Stirring Rock and Roll Momentum of "Teeth Dreams"

“Before she figures out what’s wrong, they put another record on,” Craig Finn sings in “Spinners,” a poignant mid-tempo rocker from the latest Hold Steady LP, Teeth Dreams. It also more or less functions as a one-line approximation of exactly how Teeth Dreams is going to be perceived by the Hold Steady fanbase and by the critical music community as a whole, but in order to understand why that is, we have to venture back to 2010’s Heaven is Whenever, the most poorly received album in the band’s storied catalog, and the only one that most cred-obsessed hipsters wouldn’t want in their record collections. Prior to Heaven, this band was on the hottest of streaks. The middle two albums in the band’s initial four-disc run, 2005’s Separation Sunday and 2006’s Boys & Girls in America, arrived to rapturous reviews and Pitchfork “Best New Music” notices, their boozy swirls of anthemic E Street keys, blazing guitar riffs, and Finn’s barfly narratives simultaneously positing the Hold Steady as the drunkest and most literate rock band on the scene. Naturally, that fact made them a musical outfit rife for cult appreciation.

And cult appreciation is precisely what they’ve earned. I’ve never been to a Hold Steady show, but I can imagine the whole thing – from the sweaty hole-in-the-wall venues they play to the comfortable, intoxicated atmosphere of the enterprise – and it’s fucking majestic. These guys, the way they make music and the way they present it to their audience, it’s like they’re your brothers or the guys you went to college with. They make this loud, roof-raising rock ‘n’ roll, but when a show ends or an album stops spinning, you still feel like you could just sit down and have a beer with them (or better yet, help them pack up the gear and then head out to an all-night rager). And maybe that’s why the Hold Steady’s records have always appealed to me (though I was, admittedly, a little late to the party).

My first connection with this band came in late 2009, when I was a freshman in college and crashing my buddy’s radio show to raid the station’s extensive CD library. One of the spoils of that evening was Boys & Girls in America, partly because the colorful cover caught my eye and partly because another friend of mine had always recommended the Hold Steady based on my love for the Counting Crows. A cursory listen told me that the comparison to the Crows wasn’t on point enough to make me fall instantly in love, but not off-base enough to have me grimacing and shaking my head either. The same root elements were there: the Springsteenian songwriting styles, the classic rock arrangements, the emphasis on roaring guitar solos. But the moods were where things differed. Where August & Everything After – Counting Crows’ most seminal LP – opened in desolation on “Round Here,” Boys & Girls in America exploded out of the gate with “Stuck Between Stations,” this raucous, barnstorming rock song that was meant to be played in late-night bars. Yes, these two bands may have shared similar roots, but their ideologies could hardly have been more different. The Hold Steady wrote music for the party, while the Crows wrote music for the guy who didn’t get invited to the party. And as someone who has in turns been on both sides of that interchange, the dichotomy between those two ideas has never stopped fascinating me.

Of course, the Hold Steady had some catching up to do with the Crows if they were ever going to be one of my favorite bands. By the time I first pushed play on Boys & Girls in America, I’d been a fan of Counting Crows for as long as I could remember – so long, in fact, that “Mr. Jones” may be the first rock song I remember hearing. But as I went forward in college, I became more and more drawn to the music of Craig Finn and company. Though I discovered it in the fall, Boys & Girls didn’t get much play, predictably, until Michigan’s interminable winter broke. But man, do I remember when that happened, and I do I remember when the Hold Steady finally clicked. There’s something magical about spring on a college campus. Walking to class suddenly becomes a pleasure instead of a chore; students decide to let out all of the restlessness they’ve been building for months by staying out later, getting drunker, and making more noise and bad decisions than they have all year; and everyone throws their dorm/apartment/car windows open and blares the loudest music they can find to mark the occasion. For me, in my freshman year of college – and in every year after it – the loudest music I could find was always Boys & Girls in America.

That became the legacy of that record for me, and of the band as a whole. Even though the Hold Steady were never getting as much year-round play as a lot of my other favorite bands, when spring rolled around, there was nothing I wanted to hear more. The sound of this band became synonymous with the infectious feel of springtime on a college campus. Its absence was another negative factor surrounding my dreadful sophomore year, when it stayed snowy and fucking cold until the day I drove home at the end of April – obviously offering no space for a record like Boys & Girls to shine. It became the sound of my reward the next year, though, when temperatures soared into the 70s in March, convincing me to skip studying for a test one Thursday night to drink beer with my roommates on the porch. (Spoiler alert: this did not turn out well for me.) And the band also served as soundtrack for my surprisingly bittersweet senior year, when songs like “The Sweet Part of the City” and “Southtown Girls” rang through my car on warm, dusky drives home from campus during the last weeks of college, or when “Stuck Between Stations” became my “Let’s hit the Beer Exchange* and drink until 2 a.m.” anthem.

To put it simply, this band and their records – probably more than any other musical entity – encompassed the experience of my college years. That might explain why I have more attachment to Heaven is Whenever than just about anyone else, since that album pretty much became symbolic of the limitless possibilities I was feeling when I went home for the summer between my freshman and sophomore years. To me, that record and the way it shed the meticulous characterizations and lyrical depth of the Hold Steady’s earlier music, felt like the band’s take on Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. Musically, it was more streamlined and conventional than anything the band had ever written, a fact helped along by the way Finn spoke in briefer and more generalized statements. The band’s decision to move away from detail was meant to facilitate greater relatability and to focus more on melody, and on pile-driving rockers like “The Weekenders” and “Hurricane J,” they certainly succeeded. To this day, Heaven is probably my second or third favorite Hold Steady record.

By the time Heaven is Whenever was out, though, it seemed like people were ready to stop showering the Hold Steady in critical accolades. The band had had a run of four great albums that just about everyone appreciated, and now, with album number five, it was time to start ascribing them the “past their prime” narrative. They were getting older; they were becoming fathers; they were toning down the partying and writing songs in a more conventional manner. For many people, those things meant that the Hold Steady were also done making transcendent music, which frankly, wasn’t the case at all. But once critics have locked into a narrative, it’s incredibly difficult to shake them from it. With Heaven, many wrote this band off, whether because Craig was losing touch with characters like Holly and Charlemagne or because keyboardist Franz Nicolay, a key player for most of the band's career, had decided to depart. And four years later, those same people are still writing the Hold Steady off, even though Teeth Dreams is every bit the stellar record that these guys have built a career out of making.

Part of the problem, of course, is the time gap, which brings me (at last) back to the line I used to start this essay. “Before she figures out what’s wrong, they put another record on.” That line from “Spinners” could have been the band’s mantra if it had truly wanted to reverse the less-than-flattering critical narrative given to Heaven is Whenever. The band could have immediately piled back into the studio, hired a keyboardist to replace Franz (which frankly, they should do anyway, preferably with Rami Jaffee of Wallflowers fame), and banged out a quick, rough, raw, and spontaneous record to restore the faith that the critical community once had in them. Instead, the band broke for four years, sending different members off on solo project exports, and giving fans and critics plenty of time to pick apart everything they thought was wrong with Heaven is Whenever.

The release gap between Heaven and Teeth Dreams, which stretched from May 3, 2010 to March 25, 2014, was by far the longest wait between Hold Steady records, and for a band that had started its career with three consecutive shots in 2004, 2005, or 2006, the extended delay made all the difference. Suddenly, Teeth Dreams was expected not only to shoulder the burden of following up the band’s least beloved album, but it also had to bear the weight of four years of expectations and doubts. I myself wondered if the album could possibly be able to handle the near-mythical legacy the band’s music now has in my life. But then I pressed play on Teeth Dreams for the first time, and instead of shaking my head and writing missives about how things just ain't like they used to be, my biggest complaint was that this record didn't drop a year ago to soundtrack one last college campus springtime for me.

Indeed, Teeth Dreams fits squarely in the band’s wheelhouse, generating the same sundrenched feel as their past records while simultaneously cultivating a sound and direction that is new for the band. The first half of the record is positively bulletproof, raging from the echoing, effect-laden first single (“I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You”) to the cryptic teeth dream musings of album highlight “The Only Thing.” Finn’s lyrics, while they still haven’t returned to the specificity of the first four records, are as good as ever,  dreaming up philosophical poetry about “the American sadness” (the rousing “On with the Business”) or drawing up relatable characters whose stories are as worth hearing as ever (the divorcee in “Spinners,” who heads to the big city hoping to find a new life, the weatherworn road warriors of the dusky “Ambassador,” or the idiosyncratic love interest in “The Only Thing,” who lives in her storage space out by the airport and only talks about TV). Collectively, the first five tracks on Teeth Dreams might actually make up the strongest song-by-song run on any Hold Steady record, which is clearly no small feat.

The second half of the album isn’t nearly as strong. Of the three consecutive classic rock throwbacks that kick off side two (“Big Cig,” “Wait A While,” and “Runner’s High”), only the first makes something of its high-wattage Rolling Stones esque riffage. “Runner’s High” is innocuous, a decent enough album track that probably could have been a b-side, but works well enough here. “Wait A While,” on the other hand, is a jaunty but rather dull rocker that suffers from being a thematic retread of the far superior “You Can Make Him Like You” from Boys & Girls in America. Teeth Dreams still goes out on a high note, though, with the spooky acoustics of “Almost Everything” striking a different chord than the double-lead-guitar bombast of the rest of the record, and the canyon-sized “Oaks” stretching on for nine minutes of gorgeous, slow-burn majesty.

Is Teeth Dreams as good as Boys & Girls in America or Separation Sunday? No, not quite. The slick radio rock production (courtesy of Foo Fighters veteran Nick Raskulinecz) will turn a lot of people off, with ample vocal effects and excessive sonic compression that don’t do a lot to display the band’s live bar-band roots. The decision to add another lead guitarist will also earn mixed reception, not because Lucero veteran Steve Selvidge lacks chops (he's great), but because his presence turns Teeth Dreams into such a guitar rock record that it ends up being more repetitive than any of the Hold Steady’s previous work. It goes without saying at this point that Nicolay’s keyboard flourishes are missed. But the more adventurous elements the band explored on Heaven is Whenever to replace the keys, from the slide guitar of “The Sweet Part of the City” to the rollicking clarinet solo of “Barely Breathing,” are absent here as well, and as a result, Teeth Dreams feels considerably safer and more stagnant than its predecessor. The songs are still aces though, and with the weather finally heating up for the spring, I anticipate that this record will only continue to open up. After all, I haven’t even gotten to take it for a windows-down drive yet, and that's the essential rite of passage for any Hold Steady record.

*The Kalamazoo Beer Exchange is the best college bar in the country. 

Counting Crows - Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow

Counting Crows - Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow
Cooking Vinyl, 2013
7.5/10

Let me preface this review by saying that it’s incredibly hard for me to say anything negative about Counting Crows. Without the lyrical grace and emotional inflection of frontman Adam Duritz, I probably wouldn’t be writing these words. One of my earliest musical memories was hearing this band for the first time. My family and I were climbing into the car after some bike trip, and my brother decided it was an opportune moment to slip my step-dad's copy of August and Everything After into the CD player. He skipped forward a few numbers, “Mr. Jones” issued from the speakers, and I fell in love immediately. That memory was one I considered a lot a decade later when I picked up the band’s greatest hits collection (called Films About Ghosts) and began to discover Counting Crows beyond just the singles. At that point in time, I think I owned about six CDs, half of which were Creed (I am not proud of this), but that record, which contained 16 of the Crows' “best” songs, was a turning point. Throughout that winter, I played the album almost every afternoon, and those songs breathed vitality and life into the bleak winter landscape that had taken up residence in my hometown: the rip-roaring electricity of “Angels of the Silences,” the emotional swell of “Round Here,” the poetic perfection of “A Long December” and “Mrs. Potter Lullaby,” and the nostalgic beauty of “Recovering the Satellites,” they all became a part of me.

In the nine-plus years since, Counting Crows have only released a single album of original content. Needless to say, I became a die-hard fan of the band at precisely the wrong moment. Following four terrific albums, spaced out on an every-three-year timeframe from 1993 to 2002, Films About Ghosts was the band’s way of telling the world they were taking a breather. Half a decade would pass before their fifth full-length—2008’s lukewarm Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings—hit the streets, and then Duritz and company would take another four years to come up with last year’s Underwater Sunshine, a well-executed cover album, but a cover album nonetheless. In the meantime, the band has done their best to mollify their fans’ growing restlessness with a series of live albums—a document of the Hard Candy tour in 2006 and a special full-album performance of August & Everything After in 2011—and their latest release, called Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow, is the next in that series.

To be fair, Counting Crows are a transcendent live act, and each of their live records bears its own significance and personality. Where their first concert album—1998’s Across a Wire—was a double-disc affair showcasing the band in both stripped-down acoustic and full-blown electric environments, Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow finds them as a seasoned collective of professionals, comfortable with traversing their entire catalog, transfiguring old favorites, resurrecting deep cuts, and delivering covers like they’re originals. In fact, the finest moment of the disc is the Bob Dylan song that kicks it off. “Girl From North Country,” culled from Dylan’s 1963 breakthrough, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, is one of the legendary singer/songwriter’s most yearning compositions, and this cover is as good as they come. Performed at the start of the show, with just vocals and acoustic guitar, “Girl from North Country” is a stark and intimate reminder of Duritz’s ability to generate pin-drop intensity in a room. Where many bands from the 1990s radio-rock scene now rely heavily on old hits and crowd sing-alongs to carry their shows, the Crows’ greatest asset as a live band has always been their gift for maintaining rapt audience attention in less-familiar territory.

“Round Here” is a perfect example of the above phenomenon. Originally the song that broke the silence at the top of their debut, “Round Here” rarely maintains the same arrangement and format from tour to tour. (Legend has it that the song has also never been exactly recreated in the manner it appears on record.) While the general road-map of the song remains the same—the chiming guitar intro, the poetic verses, the dynamic emotional build-up—Duritz and company frequently pepper it with alterations, improvisations, and interpolations of other artists’ songs. The “Round Here” that appears with this collection is one of the best, bursting breathtakingly into loose improv sections and sly snippets of Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing.” “Darling summer’s almost over, before the world gets too much colder/Come outside and run away with me,” Duritz wails spontaneously over the song’s elongated mid-section: for a moment, this feels like the Crows of old.

But beyond the first two tracks, the most notable thing about this particular live album is the setlist. For a band that has supported a bootleg-trading network within their fanbase for almost as long as they’ve had a fanbase, it doesn’t make much sense for Counting Crows to keep going back to the well for more “official” live releases, but if they’re going to do so, it’s at least nice that they try not to retread songs that have already appeared on previous concert discs (with a few exceptions). This particular release is loaded with deep cuts, from the harmonica-laced blues of “Mercury” (a forgotten gem from the experimental second side of 1996’s Recovering the Satellites) to a pair of songs from both This Desert Life (the road-trip folk of “Four Days” and the downright-bizarre “I Wish I Was a Girl) and Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings (the hazy emotional breakdown of “Sundays” and the haunting siren song that is “Le Ballet d’Or”). But it’s Hard Candy—which celebrated its tenth anniversary last year—that supplies the rest of the highlights.

Often dismissed as a misguided and overproduced expedition into the realms of mainstream pop music, Hard Candy is one of the most misunderstood and unfairly maligned albums in recent memory. On record, the studio gloss and soaring hooks masked a complex lyrical web, a collection of songs that revealed Adam Duritz’s increasingly serious battles with insomnia, depression, and mental instability. On the gorgeous “Carriage”—one of the forgotten late-album tracks which gets resurrected here in wonderful fashion—amidst a gentle acoustic lilt, the burn of a lone trumpet player, and lyrics about “chocolate bars and baseball cards,” a once-meaningful relationship all but vanishes into the tragedy of a losing an unborn child. “Up All Night,” meanwhile, is one of the five best songs Duritz has ever written, the kind of glorious, dusky anthem you play in the car at night when the weather is finally starting to warm up.“This is a summertime song,” Duritz announces at the song’s outset. “Hard Candy was a late night album.” If you need any extra encouragement to catch the Crows on their tour with the Wallflowers this summer, look no further than this penultimate scorcher.

Ultimately, Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow is a solid document of a great live band. The covers are good, the setlist is unique, and there are a few transcendent moments. But Counting Crows—Duritz especially—are too talented to become one of those bands that only plays live shows and releases cover albums. Maybe I’m biased, since I’d call August & Everything After the single greatest album of the nineties and since I love Hard Candy more than anyone else I’ve ever encountered, but I truly believe that Duritz has the skill, both as a songwriter and a frontman, to land in the pantheon of greats. Even if he never writes another song or never releases another album, he’s got a pretty killer legacy to leave behind. But I’d like to think that this band still has at least one classic left in them, and while frequent concert tours and live albums are nice to have, but I’m infinitely more excited for that next step forward.

Dawes - Stories Don't End

Dawes - Stories Don't End

HUB Records, 2013
9.0/10

A few years ago, when the sounds of Dawes’ sophomore record Nothing is Wrong first reached my ears, it was like a blast from the past. Equal ingredients ’70s Laurel Canyon folk-rock (Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, etc.) and ‘90s roots/alt-country (Whiskeytown, Counting Crows, The Wallflowers), the music this L.A.-based quartet was cultivating hit almost every one of my sonic sweet spots. Somewhere between the soaring, sun-kissed guitar solos, the B3-organ swells, the rich vocal harmonies, and the thoughtful lyricism, there was a band that absolutely could have been a legendary, multi-platinum act three decades earlier, but one that was probably never going to take the radio waves by storm in the here and now. Apparently the band sensed that feeling too: no longer content with simply being really good folk-rock revivalists, Dawes have evolved on their new album—titled Stories Don’t End—to a point where it feels like anything is possible for their future endeavors.

From the moment Stories Don’t End bursts open, with a lush vocal crescendo at the top of “Just Beneath the Surface,” it’s clear that these guys are a different band than they were a few years ago. Once regarded as a terrific live outfit that could never quite capture the electric charge of their performances on record, Dawes have clearly learned to use the studio to their advantage this time around. Credit producer Jacquire King, who covers these 12 tunes in a warmer and more consistent layer of studio sheen than we’ve seen on past albums. With his strong and assured presence behind the boards, the band seems to open up a bit more here, lending album highlights like “Just Beneath the Surface” and “From the Right Angle” a grandiose, arena-ready sensibility, or turning the piano-led first single “From a Window Seat” into a disorienting pop-rock trip. When a frantic guitar solo kicks through the wall on the latter, we know we’re in good hands.

If the opening of the record is strong though, it’s the mid-section where these guys really hit their stride. The chiming guitar chords that open “Most People” herald one of the best and most majestic songs frontman Taylor Goldsmith has ever written. The song builds effortlessly, carried along by an infectious refrain and one of Goldsmith’s finest vocal performances to date. And when the band dials it back down for the outro—a call and response fugue between Taylor and his brother Griffin (the band’s drummer)—you’ll have trouble doing anything but hit “Replay.” The powerful, cathartic build of “Something Common” is even better, beginning on a subtle, restrained note (“All my mornings start with the alarm clock/Every dream gets stopped before the end,” Goldsmith sings at the outset), and building to a shout-it-to-the-rafters conclusion that ranks among the best musical moments I’ve heard all year. “‘Cause all the love and friends and happiness that ever came my way/Revealed themselves the moment I stopped watching,” rolls the final chorus, exploding from the speakers like a pure and fierce confession of the heart. “‘Cause it’s not faith that comes from miracles, but miracles that come from faith/And I’m sure that they’ve got something in common.” Perfect.

The above is just one lyrical gem in a song rife with them, from a band with a better way with words than most working today. Sure, that song is also graced by a gorgeous bed of instrumentation, from cinematic piano chords to emotive electric guitar lines, but it only reaches the next level when you sit back and let the poetic beauty of the words course through you. And that’s the case with the rest of this record as well, from the Springsteenian characters of “Bear Witness” (the granddaughter who's still working at the movies, letting all her boyfriends in for free), to the haunting cliffhanger of “Stories Don’t End” (“They go on and on, just someone stops listening...”), and certainly to the glorious, travel-worn troubadour tribute that is “From the Right Angle” (“I need a cold beer from a dressing room, I need a string of dates back out/I think there are a few of us that still belong out on the road”). If you’ve been looking for a collection of songs to soundtrack the upcoming summer months, songs that could ring from the stage of an evening music festival as fireworks explode in the sky, or songs that could ring through your car as you cruise down a sunburned highway, look no further.

Throughout its 12 tracks, Stories Don’t End strikes a perfect balance between lyrical ingenuity and musical accessibility, between classic rock throwback and modern musical relevance, between instrumental virtuosity and full-bodied, beating-heart passion. Goldsmith’s songs are catchy and comfortable, but they’re never easy. You can imagine something like “From a Window Seat” or “Just Beneath the Surface” making minor waves on college radio—probably more than anything off previous albums—but it’s only with time and intimate attention to the lyrical and musical details that the layers of these songs begin to peel away. I could easily (and happily) waste an evening digging through these songs, obsessing over cryptic lines from Goldsmith and trying to decipher precisely what they mean, or marveling at vintage-sounding musical passages and playing classic albums alongside them in a quest to figure out the band's every influence. Hell, even the numbers that feel more “minor,” like the raucous cover of Blake Mills’ “Hey Lover,” or the rollicking, bass-driven country of “Someone Will,” suggest that spending an afternoon with these guys and their record collections would be any music fan’s dream come true.

But ultimately what matters most is that there are no weak moments here: the songs are great, the album sequencing and pacing is faultless, and the band has never sounded better. And while elements of the ‘70s Laurel Canyon scene are still evident here, they’re surrounded by so many other nuances of folk and rock music’s back pages that they no longer feel like the obvious focus. Stories Don’t End, as a result,is neither a throwback album nor an entirely modern one. It is, quite simply, a Dawes album. It’s the sound of a young band coming into their own unique musical niche and making the record they’ve been reaching for since they first hit the scene in 2009. And if there’s any justice, the record it will be a sounding board for a long and storied career: from all indications, it seems like this band has what it takes to be one of the greats.

The Wallflowers - Glad All Over

The Wallflowers - Glad All Over
Columbia Records, 2012
Four stars

Next to the wailing harmonica and slamming screen door that kick start Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, few album introductions are as effective as the ringing guitar that heralds the arrival of The Wallflowers’ 1996 album Bringing Down the Horse. The song it belongs to, “One Headlight,” was where my whole big and messy obsession with music started, my first favorite song from my first favorite band, and 16 years later, it’s still in the upper echelons. The album remains in my all time top ten as well, a gorgeous array of steel guitars, ringing organ lines, and roots rock grandeur (and a true summer night staple) with lyrics that I could sing along to in my sleep. And somehow, as baffling as it seems now, those songs were making waves on the radio, too. But something happened after that album and the band fell out of the public consciousness as quickly as they had entered it. One particularly enlightened sports fan blamed the fall from grace on Springsteen himself, saying that, when Bruce joined Jakob Dylan and company onstage for “Headlight” at the 1997 VMAs, he “rediscovered his ability to rock” and turned the whole event into his own personal comeback, hijacking the ‘Flowers’ song “right out of their feeble hands” and crushing their spirits in the process.

Perhaps that was the case, but I would prefer to blame the band’s exit from the spotlight on the changing musical landscape. When The Wallflowers finally released the follow up to Horse in 2000 (called Breach), they could hardly have been further from what pop music had become. They were a folk-indebted classic rock band trying to survive in an age of boy band and pop princesses, and those recipes were never going to mix. Their next two albums, 2002’s Red Letter Days and 2006’s Rebel, Sweetheart, didn’t change that, remaining within the same roots rock wheelhouse where the band had always resided. But even though The Wallflowers never did evolve that much, I still loved them. Their songs were always deeply comforting and nostalgic for me: theirs was the kind of music I would put on at the end of a hard day or during some personal crisis. and it would whisk me off to the carefree days of my childhood without a second glance. More than any other band, save for perhaps the Counting Crows, The Wallflowers’ records were the ones I grew up on, and all of them remain incredibly important to me. Sweetheart, in particularly, is fantastic: a songwriting master-class that saw Jakob Dylan’s lyrical abilities reaching levels that reflected his heritage (his father is Bob Dylan, after all) and melodic strains that were unforgettable after a single listen.

For a long time, it seemed like Sweetheart would be their swan song. Dylan went solo, moving towards more overtly folk and country textures on a pair of records called Seeing Things and Women and Country, respectively. I enjoyed both, but for me, Dylan’s breathy rasp always sounded best with the full force of his band behind him, with electric instrumentation and the ringing surge of Rami Jaffee’s B3 organ serving as his accompaniment. So naturally, when I heard the band was pulling back together to record their sixth full-length (and their first album in six years), I was ecstatic. And while the result, called Glad All Over, rarely approaches the heights of its predecessor, it’s still hard for me to describe how happy I am to have these guys back.

When it dropped a few months back, first single “Reboot the Mission” made waves as a jarring shift for a band that listeners had always pretty much counted on to do some variation of a similar sound. Instead of a folk-y lilt, the song had a loud, harsh, Clash-esque drive to it, from the blatantly Brit-rock chorus to funky bassline to the retro guitar echo. Undoubtedly, Clash guitarist Mick Jones, (who guest stars on the song) had a lot to do with that direction (as does drummer Jack Irons, who, as Dylan notes in the song, "jammed with the mighty Joe Strummer" on his album Earthquake Weather), but his influence doesn't stop there. Glad All Over is louder, brasher, and more rock-based than any album in the band’s discography, from the groovy blues-stomp of opener “Hospitals for Sinners” to the throwback guitar solo on “It’s a Dream.” Sometimes the influence works perfectly, like on “Misfits and Lovers,” which surrounds a classic Jakob Dylan chorus with Jones’ sexy, freewheeling guitar riffs. Elsewhere it doesn’t work at all, like on the snoozer that is “The Devil’s Waltz,” a textbook case of filler material redeemed only slightly by another blistering guitar solo. Most of the time though, it’s a pleasure to hear the band sound so loose and spontaneous: these guys clearly know their way around a recording studio, and on Glad All Over they sound like a gang of seasoned vets.

But still, it’s the nostalgic nuggets, the songs that sound like they could have fit on Bringing Down the Horse or Breach that hit the closest to home. “First One in the Car” plays like the missing link between “6th Avenue Heartache” and “Bleeders,” the kind of gorgeous, organ-drenched mid-tempo rocker that Dylan has always been able to pull off at the most opportune moments. A steel guitar rings through “Constellation Blues” in chilling fashion, giving the song a spacious, road-trippin’ atmosphere that befits its penultimate placement perfectly. Dylan’s lyrics are in top form here, recalling his best and most poetic moments from Sweetheart and making me wish there were a few more traditional folk songs to delve into on this record. “My birthday’s in two months, I’ll be twenty-one/I am the second oldest to an only son/The third generation to carry a gun/I’ve got brown eyes like my mother does,” Dylan spits out early on, just one image in a series of vivid lyrical depictions that are all too easy to get lost in. And the wistful “Love is a Country” is the album’s highlight, a piece of full-bodied grandiosity that swells with acoustic guitars, echoes of pedal steel, and distant piano chords before it reaches a euphoric conclusion.

None of these songs reinvent the wheel: not the Clash-infused lead-single, not the Magic-era Springsteen-posturing (“It Won’t be Long (Till We’re Not Wrong Anymore)” or “Have Mercy on him Now”), and certainly not the traditional roots-rock approach of the album’s best songs. But The Wallflowers have always been a band that excelled at bringing new life to things we’d heard before, and that remains true on Glad All Over. It’s far from their best record and I might have expected a little bit more after a six year hiatus, but for my first favorite band, I’m willing to let a few things slide. Maybe Springsteen did break their spirits back in ‘97, but I prefer to believe that they gave him the exuberant rock ‘n’ roll experience he needed to realize how much he wanted to have the E-Street Band beside him once more. Either way, it’s great to see an outfit as tight as The Wallflowers still trucking, twenty years down the road from their debut and fifteen years past their last scrape with “relevance.” Here’s to another twenty more...even if that popularity never comes again.

Matchbox Twenty - North

Matchbox Twenty - North

Atlantic Records, 2012

Four stars

Well it's certainly been a year awash in '90s nostalgia. Before 2012 is out, we will have heard new work from Counting Crows, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Wallflowers, Green Day, Dave Matthew's Band, Eve 6, Our Lady Peace, No Doubt, Ben Folds Five, and probably a dozen more acts that I can't name off the top of my head. Most of those artists have been gone for at least three years, several have been flitting in and out of operation for the better part of the last ten years, and a few of them are releasing their first full-length albums in a decade.

The last time Rob Thomas made a genuine album with his band, it was 2002. The album was called More Than You Think You Are and it released the day after I turned twelve. Back then, I hadn’t become the music enthusiast I am now, but I still loved Matchbox Twenty: I always had, ever since the days when my brother used to play Yourself or Someone Like You on car rides to school in the morning. Their brand of easily digestible, melodic alternative-rock appealed to me greatly, and the fact that they had three albums where I liked ALL of the songs (a common occurrence for me now, but not so much back then) made them, fairly easily, my first "favorite band." If the charts were anything to go by, a lot of people agreed with me. Over the next year or two, More Than You Think You Are would spawn a handful of singles that became nearly ubiquitous. You couldn't turn on the radio without hearing the elegiac banjo acoustics of "Unwell," the Mick Jagger-assisted blues-rock of "Disease," or the piano-laced bombast of "Bright Lights," and I was glad for it. In a sea of pop, rap, and R&B that I didn't care for at all, Rob Thomas and the boys were an old standby that I was happy to see achieve continued success.

As I got more and more into music throughout 2003 and 2004, Matchbox's records remained in fairly constant rotation, and I remember anxiously hoping for the day that the band would announce their plans to put out another LP.

I didn't know that I was about to wait for a long, long time.

Rob Thomas went solo in 2005, delivering the lukewarm ...Something to Be, but promising that Matchbox Twenty would be reconvening once they all got their "go-it-alone" urges out of their systems. That reunion finally happened in 2007 - almost exactly five years after More Than You Think You Are dropped - but even then, it wasn't the day that I had anticipated back in my musically formative days. Rather than releasing a full-length follow-up to their 2002 smash, they announced that they were readying a greatest hits collection (to be called Exile on Mainstream, in another hint to Jagger) that would feature an EP's worth of new material. The greatest hits tracklist was safe, marking off all the requisite radio staples and ignoring the deeper cuts; the new songs, meanwhile, ranged from solid to great, but only made me want more. I wondered if these guys would ever make another album together, and if they did, whether or not it would just sound like a Rob Thomas solo effort.

Luckily, North is the best record Rob Thomas has made since 2002, and offers rock-solid evidence that the frontman is always better with his trusty band of brothers at his back. Opener "Parade" is an achingly gorgeous ode to the times of our life that fly by far too quickly, and it instantly recalls the best moments of the MB20 discography. "When the slow parade went past/And it felt so good you knew it couldn't last/And all too soon the end was gonna come without a warning/And you'd have to just go home," Thomas croons, seemingly bottling up a decade's worth of bygone memories and missed opportunities into one knock-out beauty of a song. The same can be said for "Overjoyed," a signature Rob Thomas love ballad that could have fit easily on the band's last album. Both tunes are safe, playing to the same formula that the band has utilized throughout their entire career: emotional, heart-on-your-sleeve pop-rock that's easy to like and hard to hate. Surrounding the lead-off single (the insanely catchy "She's so Mean") at the album's kick-off, "Parade" and "Overjoyed" struck me as exactly what I wanted "North" to be, and exactly what I thought it would fall short of being: nostalgic while also sounding fresh, reminiscent of past glories while also forging new ones. And most of all, NOT like a Thomas solo album. I thought that, if the album stuck in that same safe but oh-so-appealing vein throughout, it would be on the fast-track towards my end-of-the-year top ten.

Sadly, "North" has a couple missteps. The jarring "Put Your Hands Up" is about as bad as you would expect a song with that title to be, and breaks the reverie of the opening trio with an incredibly misguided attempt at a dance anthem. The lyrics are Rob Thomas's most cringe-worthy to date, a mélange of outdated pop music clichés that would fail even with the most tongue-in-cheek delivery, and with an earworm hook so gratingly catchy that listeners might do better just to delete the song and replace it with a bonus track. Luckily, the other two tracks in the “dance” vein, the groovy synth-based "How Long" and the dark-flavored pop of "Like Sugar," work out much better, successfully blending that old '90s radio rock sound with today's more electronic influence. The former, especially, is infectious.

Still, the best songs here are the ones that land closest to the way the band used to do things. "Our Song" and the brassy "Radio" both have the kind of driving beat and rock sensibility that Thomas's solo records mostly lacked, while the ringing guitar lines and expansive atmospherics of "The Way" (which sees guitarist Kyle Cook taking lead vocals) make the song an undeniable highlight. “English Town” is the set’s most adventurous moment, an orchestral, multi-layered mid-tempo rocker that builds from a haunting piano intro (straight out of Sia's "Breathe Me") into a haunting but all-too-brief explosion of horns. And "Sleeping at the Wheel" closes the album in the same vein that "Parade" opened it - with a gorgeous ballad that is very much in the band's wheelhouse, but which hits hard nonetheless.

It's never easy for a band to come back after an extended absence, be it four years, eight years, or a decade. With North, there's some obvious rust that Thomas and co had to shake off, and the result, while very enjoyable, doesn't quite live up to the stuff they were putting out in their heyday. That said, there are a lot of great songs here, and in a year that has been lacking in great pop and pop rock albums, this record is a very welcome addition. At their best, the songs from North can still stand up against anything Rob Thomas has ever written: "Parade" is as solid as "3AM" ever was, "Radio" could go shot for shot with "Long Day" any day of the week, and if "Overjoyed" doesn't replicate the smash hit success of "Unwell," then you can only blame the shifting music scene. There are a few duds here, but what Matchbox Twenty come up with the rest of the time is a lovable bunch of songs that will almost certainly land somewhere on my end-of-the-year list, a collection that is better and more consistent than either of the ones Thomas put together on his own, and one that announces the return of one of the best bands in radio rock: I only hope that, this time, they don't spend a decade on the bench.

The Smashing Pumpkins - Oceania

The Smashing Pumpkins - Oceania

EMI, 2012

3.5 stars

It’s weird: I’ve been listening to The Smashing Pumpkins for almost seventeen years, ever since my brother added the sprawling double album that is Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness to his CD collection. In that time, I’ve pretty much gone along with the crowd, adoring the band’s revered songs and albums, spurning their indulgences and failures, and basically writing off Billy Corgan (and his ego) after it was clear that his glory days were behind him. In that sense, I guess I’ve never really become a true fan of the Pumpkins, even in all the time that I’ve been familiar with their music. That makes a certain amount of sense, since I spent my childhood far more enthralled by mainstream roots/country influenced music (The Wallflowers, Counting Crows) than by Corgan’s brand of dark alternative rock. I loved the hits, stuff like “1979,” “Disarm,” and “Tonight, Tonight,” songs with big sweep, great melodies, and fairly safe, accessible structures. I struggled more with the harder rock songs, and moments like “XYU” or “Tales of a Scorched Earth” were ones that I almost always skipped on my listens through Mellon Collie.

It’s not surprising that Corgan’s suffocating, totalitarian band-leading style led to the destruction of the original Smashing Pumpkins. It’s well known in Pumpkins lore that Corgan went back and re-recorded the guitar and bass parts on Siamese Dream, thinking – probably correctly – that he could play them better himself. The band went their separate ways shortly after the turn of the century, and only drummer Jimmy Chamberlain returned in 2006 when Corgan decided to make a “comeback” album. The result, Zeitgeist was arguably the worst album Corgan ever made, with or without the Pumpkins moniker: a dull, self-indulgent mess of a record, with metallic production and songs that, even at their best, just weren’t very good.

Chamberlain called it quits in 2009 and Corgan replaced him too: he kickstarted a series of conceptual EPs (called Teargarden by Kaleidyscope), and for the first time, he was the only original member left standing. But The Smashing Pumpkins, at there core, were always Corgan’s brainchild anyway, and for the eighth full-length album under the moniker, Oceania, he sounds largely re-energized and reborn. It doesn’t hurt that the band, made up of a trio of young guns, acquit themselves remarkably well, or that Corgan actually has the musical means to go after his more ambitious ideas (look no further than the sprawling, nine-minute title track, a gorgeous suite of a song that actually justifies its length, unlike the painful “United States” from the last record). All told, Oceania is the best Corgan has sounded since Mellon Collie, the first time in a decade where the use of The Smashing Pumpkins name doesn’t feel like an embarrassment to his legacy, and, perhaps most importantly, a set of songs worth hearing and replaying.

Make no mistake, Oceania is still far from perfect. It’s too bloated and overlong for its own good (at almost exactly one hour, the album will lose listeners at its less compelling moments), and Corgan often seems like he’s trying to recreate songs from previous albums – albeit, less successfully. But the fact that the frontman keeps his ego in check and dodges his hubristic indulgences throughout, even if the result comes across as relatively “safe,” could also be viewed as the key to the album’s ultimate victory. Judging from the journalistic response to the post-glory days Pumpkins output, from Adore to the Machina albums, and certainly to Zeitgeist, it almost seemed like listeners were yearning to hear Corgan to do things like he used to. He does his best to satisfy that desire here, conjuring up Siamese Dream’s fuzzy-guitar fury on opener “Quasar,” delivering a less theatrical re-write of “Disarm” on “The Celestials,” the acoustic-based first single, and bursting through the gates on “The Chimera” with a “the-90s-called-and-they-want-their-guitar-sound-back” style riff thrown in for good measure.

Musically, Oceania is fairly captivating throughout. Haunting synth-lines drive highlights like “Violet Rays,” “One Diamond, One Heart,” and album-closer “Wildflower,” while “Pale Horse” has a chiming romantic sweep that is nothing short of cinematic. The centerpiece, a liltingly gorgeous power ballad called “Pinwheels,” builds from yet-another synthesizer intro into an anthem, showcasing ringing guitar lines (including a stunning slide-guitar that serenades the arrangement) and a bed of strings that give the song an orchestral sensibility. In fact, the music is so stunning that Billy Corgan ends up being, rather ironically, the weakest player in the entire production. Corgan has never been a great singer, but his tortured delivery was perfect for connecting with listeners in the old days, and his unique nasally tone only ever added to the mood that the band’s music was going for. This time around though, something feels off: maybe it’s the production, which is too slick to lend the record a true throwback appeal; perhaps it’s the mix, which places the vocals at an awkward level throughout; or it could be the lyrics, which generally come across as insipid and uninspired. Regardless of the cause, Oceania lacks the emotional force that it needed to transcend what it is: a former rock star trying to sound vital again. Corgan makes big steps towards that goal, and it’s clear that he has the musical integrity, the arrangements, and especially the supporting talent that he needs get there, but for now, he’s still stuck in the waiting room.

The Gaslight Anthem - Handwritten

The Gaslight Anthem - Handwritten

Mercury Records, 2012

Five stars

Last December, when I ranked Brian Fallon's side project (The Horrible Crowes, with an album titled Elsie) as my sixth favorite record of the year, I speculated that, probably, the young frontman still had his masterpieces ahead of him. That was a still few months before the title and tracklist for Handwritten, the fourth full-length album from Fallon and his main bandmates in The Gaslight Anthem, surfaced online, but I already had high hopes for what 2012 would bring for them. And how could I not? Fallon worships Springsteen and is a disciple of Petty; he's shared the stage with the E-Street Band; he can bellow like Tom Waits or croon like the old Motown legends: his band can scorch the stage like The Clash or convincingly deliver covers of untouchable hits like "Baba O' Riley" by The Who; and on Handwritten, that band, with Fallon at the forefront, finally has the talent, the resources, the songs, and the timing to make a case for themselves, not only as one of the last great rock 'n' roll acts, but as one of the all time greats, period.

I adored The '59 Sound, the 2008-released near-masterpiece that, until now, has stood as Fallon and co's definitive statement. That record was a deep collection of vintage rock 'n' roll, from the nostalgic Springsteen references to the wistful summertime imagery that drenched many of its songs, and in the years since its release, it has become a personal favorite of mine. 2010's American Slang was almost as good, trading Springsteen for shades of Motown pop ("Bring it On") and Van Morrison spontaneity ("The Diamond Church Street Choir"), but on the whole, it was distinctly less immediate. Detractors claimed that the band had shed every ounce of the punk influence that had defined their debut (Sink or Swim, a solid debut, but their weakest work so far) in exchange for a cleaner, more commercially viable sound. And while that was true, the main problem was that, as great as American Slang was, it just wasn't quite up to the level of its predecessor.


A killer side project, an adventurous covers EP, and a major record contract later, The Gaslight Anthem is finally ready to play in the big leagues. They bring in Brendan O'Brien, Springsteen's most recent go-to producer, to help them punch up the sound for their first play in the major label world, and boy, is it a powerful one. O'Brien, as is his custom, makes the band sound huge, bringing Fallon's distinctive vocals and Alex Rosamilia's massive lead guitar sound to the forefront, while leaving the talented rhythm section (Alex Levine on bass and Benny Horowitz on drums) to hold everything together. And surprisingly, despite the presence of Springsteen's producer in the studio, Handwritten ends up being the first time that The Gaslight Anthem haven't sounded at all like a band living in the shadow of their idols. It's one thing to wear your influences on your sleeve and another to actually quote them directly, and while Fallon's tendency towards lyrical references has always been one of the most enjoyable quirks of his songwriting (he prominently borrowed from both Springsteen and Counting Crows, among others, on The '59 Sound), his best songs have been the ones that have stood on their own. Luckily, Handwritten is the sound of a band who have only gotten better and come further into their own with each passing release. This time around, the boys aren't just paying tribute to Springsteen, or sharing the stage with him: this time, they're challenging him.

When Springsteen dropped Wrecking Ball earlier this year, I proclaimed it a late-career masterpiece, called it his best work since the '80s, and wondered seriously whether any artist would be able to make an album as good all year. But right from my introductory listen of Handwritten, right from the first time I pressed play and experienced this record, it was clear that The Gaslight Anthem had crafted something special. That was evident from first single and album opener "45," a propulsive hymn to the power of rock 'n' roll that burns with the energy of a hundred lesser acts. When the single dropped at the end of April, I almost immediately called it one of the band's best performances on record. O'Brien had captured everything that makes this band great, from the desperation in Fallon's voice to the classic rock swell that the band sits in so perfectly, and I figured that, if this song were the rule and not the exception, The Gaslight Anthem could just have an album of the year on their hands. Luckily for me, "45" is actually one of the weaker tracks, igniting a perfect five song progression that kicks off the record and climaxes with the almost Oasis-esque "Keepsake." The song, which features a particularly scorching guitar line, courtesy of Rosamilia, sees Fallon opening up about his relationship with his father. Marked by one of the biggest and angriest choruses the band has ever penned, "Keepsake" shatters into a tremulous cascade of plucked strings at the break, giving listeners a brief respite before the chorus barrels back in.

In between, Fallon and his trio of band members deliver three of the best songs they've ever written. The title track revisits the nighttime themes that accentuated the best tracks on The '59 Sound ("Here in the dark I cherish the moonlight/I'm in love with the way you're in love with the night," Fallon sings on one of the album's best lyrical couplets), while also lending it with some of the same darkness that surrounded Fallon's work with The Horrible Crowes. In addition, the song sheds a bit of light on the writing process behind the record. As the title suggests, Fallon scrawled the lyrics for these songs into a beat up old notebook, and the result is his most immediate and most personal collection to date. Want proof? Look no further than the transcendent highlight that is "Here Comes My Man," a rhythmically driving throwback to the girls groups of the 1960s and to Phil Spector's legendary "Wall of Sound" production technique. Springsteen has never been shy about his adoration for 1960s pop, especially girl groups like The Crystals and The Ronettes, and The Gaslight Anthem adopt that love as their own here. The song, told from the point of view of a female, offers an interesting lyrical direction reminiscent of the multiple gender-switching perspectives Jimmy Eat World employed on 2010's Invented. It also features an irresistible "sha la la" hook and one of Fallon's strongest vocal performances ever, two aspects that combine to make one of the summer's best should-be-hits: the Boss would be proud.

"Mulholland Drive" is almost as good, landing somewhere between '90s Counting Crows and Sam's Town-era Killers, and building to a spiraling guitar hook that is nothing short of indelible. The grungy "Too Much Blood" is another time capsule from the '90s, and will likely be considered the album's centerpiece cut thanks to a 5 minute run-time. The ghost of Kurt Cobain and the shadow of Eddie Vedder drift through the song's anthemic chorus, its dirty guitar lines, and Fallon's anguished, near-shouted vocals. And while neither of the '90s alt-rock gods have ever been idols of mine, Fallon's attempt to channel them pays off, giving the album's middle section an epic grandiosity that has been lacking thus far. "Howl" changes directions yet again, coming in at just over two minutes, and delivering the kind of spontaneous, shout-along anthem that the fans of their punk days have been begging for. It's far from a highlight, but the song serves its purpose and would likely be brilliant in a live setting.

"Biloxi Parish" and "Desire" land the closest to the territory the band mined on American Slang, with the former offering up a massive hook, and the latter, while probably the album's least distinctive number, still holding true to the impossibly high standard that Fallon and his band set early on with this record. But that bar is quite simply blown away with the final two tracks, as The Gaslight Anthem save the best songs on the disc (and arguably the best songs in their career, short of The '59 Sound's epic closer "The Backseat") for last. First is "Mae," a flawless penultimate number with a gorgeous sonic sweep and a tearful lyrical drive that will undoubtedly land it near the top of my "songs of the year" list. "And still this city pumps its aching heart for one more drop of blood/We work our fingers down to dust/While we wait for kingdom come with the radio on," Fallon croons, giving himself over to song's emotional and sentimental nature. It's a ballad, through and through, a heart-on-your-sleeve, thoroughly moving piece of music that hits all the right marks and lands as one of the best things Fallon has ever done. And while the Sink or Swim fans will likely cry "sell out" and beg for the punk edge that this band has long since shed, when "Mae" and its nostalgic guitar riff pour out of my speakers, I know that The Gaslight Anthem have reached a new level. When I hear this song, in the car on late summer nights, or through my headphones as I sit watching the sun go down and the season begin to dwindle, I know that I'm hearing something that truly matters.

"National Anthem" brings the record full-circle, ending it with a song that is both open-ended and resoundingly final. The spirit of Darkness on the Edge of Town-era Springsteen is at work here, in the atmospheric acoustic guitar picking, in the lush and haunting strings, and certainly in Fallon's words. "I remember she used to look so good in that dress/Now she just screams how I promised her more than this," he sings at the song's key moment, channeling the weathered and regretful, yet still somehow resilient voice that Bruce so memorably adopted for the most harrowing cuts on his 1978 classic. And while Fallon steers clear of reference and imitation on Handwritten (aside from the stellar bonus track "Blue Dahlia," which borrows a lyric from R.E.M.'s "Nightswimming"), his idols and influences are never far from the proceedings here. If The '59 Sound was Fallon's The Wild, The Innocent, The E-Street Shuffle, a rich tapestry of summer nights, pastime memories, carnival imagery, infinite youth, and lost heroes, and if Elsie was his Nebraska, then Handwritten is unequivocally his Darkness on the Edge of Town. It's his darkest, most personal, and most importantly, best album yet; it's a maze of fantastic hooks, soaring guitar lines, and personal confessions, both elated and anguished, and literally every time it ends, all I want to do is hit replay. I still think his Born to Run is ahead of him, but for now, I am content in calling Handwritten a bona fide masterpiece. It's the record I will remember as this year's summer soundtrack, the record that will encapsulate memories and moments from this season for as long as I continue to play it. It's also the best album of the year, edging out Springsteen himself, and for four New Jersey punks who have spent their lives and their careers chasing that impossible legacy, there can be no higher praise.