Counting Crows: Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

"If you see my picture in a magazine/I'm just tryin' to make some sense outta me," Adam Duritz apologizes on the Crows' first studio album in six years. We know, dude: Life in L.A. is tough. A record about holding on to your soul amid delusions (of celebrity, masculine vanity, nationalism and love), Saturday Nights has something to prove, opening with bare-knuckle riffs and veering between outsize, Gil Norton-produced rock-radio fare and introspective balladry. The hair-shirt single "You Can't Count on Me" and the cheerily grim "Hanging Tree" are little masterpieces of pop craft, their arrangements and Duritz's invitingly petulant wail often echoing golden-era R.E.M. Sometimes that craft is enough: The latter song is so packed with guitar fireworks that its buzz-killing lines about freezing to death barely register. But sometimes that's not enough: The spiritual emptiness of getting Italian disco hotties to go down on their knees before you — which Duritz bemoans in "1492" — is an existential crisis many people would love to have.