Counting Crows--C/D

I hated then when they arrived on the scene, and Durvitz sounds like he's singing while exercising on a treadmill. and nothing subsequent was much better.

(NB: I am totally lying my ass off in the above sentence.)

xpost: hahahaha!

Well, my way is by saying "Classic."

*throws middle fingers at everyone and runs off*

"Counting Crows fan in ashamed to reveal true identity shocker."

Agreed that's he is not a good-looking guy. He's also a non-good-looking guy who's been in four confirmed relationships with hot actresses. Then again, if he miserably botched all of them, and there is evidence to suggest that he did, then your point stands.

I think their talent for quality songwriting is overlooked; I also think this for the Gin Blossoms.

Theire most famous record still looks like it's by Cunting Crews.

"A Long December" is pretty.

They aren't the Wallflowers.

So neither classic nor dud.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

But they are forever burned into my head for Big Yellow Taxi and that song/video sums up everything wrong with them. INCLUDING having Vanessa Carlton in the video and credited on the song when all she did was go "mmmm-bop-bop-bop."

Like Hanson didn't already cover the whole Mmmbop thing. What the hell more does she think needs to be added?

I'll refrain from any jokes about Fatty Dread Man and his Gut of Goo.

Greatest hits => Classic

Not so much DUD as, say, STAB.

Sorry what??

I'd rather count sheep.

thank you.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38205000/jpg/_38205816_crows_pa_150.jpg http://www.artistdirect.com/Images/Sources/AMGPORTRAITS/music/portrait200/drp000/p014/p01479o6a7f.jpg

CLASSSSSSSSIC. I really don't get the hate. I just went through their discography today thinking I'd end up hating my 12-year-old self, but after listening to a number of tracks, I think my CC love was justified. OK, so Hard Candy/August and Everything After are mostly filled with bad Train/Dave Matthews-esque tracks, almost all of their songs on Recovering the Satellites and This Desert Life are brilliant...especially "Chelsea," "High Life," and "I'm Not Sleeping."

So, what's the problem? I see people complaining because they're 'mopey,' but what makes them any more mopey than Joy Division? Do you not believe that Duritz is really that sad? Or is his sadness just not as real? Or have you just heard the singles?

(p.s. - sample lyric for your response: "Some people will cut you 'til you're bleeding/but not me, 'cause I just want to do it to myself")

(and yes, I realize that I probably just nixed the little credibility I had)

Counting Crows can suck the dick off George W.

Considering as I love love love love "Hangin' Around," "Angels of the Silences," and "Long December" it's amazing I've never ever found myself compelled to investigate them beyond that. The dumpy dreads guy is a HUGE turnoff, you could put that guy in any band and I would be too embarassed for my indie cred to go near their records. Maybe when I'm 40 and lose my childish ways.

UGLY DORKS TRADING IN ROCK STAR STATUS FOR GRADE A TRIM Exhibit # 3,481,567
"Duritz has dated actresses Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, who appeared in the music video "Long December", Mary Louise Parker, Monica Potter (the Mrs Potter in "Mrs Potter's Lullaby" from This Desert Life) and Winona Ryder"

Not as good as the Cutting Crew.

The new one isn't half bad, if you're into the mopey, dreaded rock star thing. Certainly the best thing they've done since This Desert Life and almost makes me forgive that atrocious Shrek song and horrid Joni Mitchell cover.

I love "A Long December" so much. It's so sad and pretty. I remember once I was driving around on a gray, snowy day in Minneapolis and I was all bummed out and it came on the radio and it was perfect.

"A Long December" is all I know or need to know. I somehow missed it when it was new, then discovered it while shopping (!) a couple years back. I'm inside my brain looking at my feet in the soup aisle or whatever, and all of a sudden I realize how sad and beautiful the muzak raining down on me is this day, and it was "ALD."

I downloaded a few more tracks that were kind of dopey and sucky, so that was that, but man, I can still listen to "A Long December" five times in a row, no problem. It's one of my favorite songs ever, punches me in the gut and gives me the prettiest heartached every time, and I have no issue saying it either.

A separate discussion might be "was the sheer plaintive melancholic beauty of this song an accident?" and to that colloquy I would have nothing at all to contribute.

Still think they're classic. Something really special about that middle period. Was watching CRUEL INTENTIONS a few weeks ago, and "Colorblind" really hit me. Also, this one:

Counting Crows fans to thread plz

I used to like them and I have a fondness for certain songs, but I find the ballads unbearable, sorry.

ayo these dudes had some jams.

The first record came out when I was at the absolute zenith of my early-teen indie snobbery and yet if I happen to hear a single from that album over the speakers at a bar I get a small whiff of that nostalgic feeling I thought I would be above. Perhaps that makes them slightly superior to their contemporaries, or perhaps it is just the alcohol. A non-mean-spirited dud.

one of my bros is in a minimal-electronica band with the guitarist... sounds NOTHING like CCrows...

the acoustic half of across a wire is really really tight.

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1yts9uZ3m1qc3wjlo1_500.jpg

"Long December" playing in the hotel restaurant where I'm trying to eat breakfast. Truly, this is the worst music of all fucking time.

So this is a pretty glowing review. I've never been into this band, but that write up is very enticing.

Any thoughts?

new record is pretty nice!, he announced to no one

"cover up the sun" really sweetly harnesses the vibes of folksy grateful dead

it's possible this is the least insufferable crows record bc almost none of the lyrics are about how duritz is an abandoned dreadlocked baby no one likes

justifying my continued affection for this band to someone the other day i said "it's a dude who desperately wants to be van morrison fronting a band who desperately wants to be the band and i think these are noble pursuits. it's just unfortunate that frontdude wants to invest the pursuit with his broetry"

and i say that still loving a lot of his lyrics. anyway this is my fifth post in a row in the counting crows c/d thread

I secretly like this band way more than I should

oh good, someone else

my favorite counting crows record is still hard candy which imo is at least 70 percent an album about insomnia and relentlessly traveling the country within the shifting center of that insomnia, 20 percent an album about memory, 5 percent an album about richard manuel dying, 5 percent an abominable big yellow taxi cover

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRjZE-_8BsM

if you don't come through, i wouldn't wait for you
i understand that everyone goes disappearing
into the greater gray that covers over everyday
and hovers in the distance

is a pretty good lyric imo

i liked that Potter's Lullaby one

I like most of the first album and a few things on the second.

duritz was a total dick to me right when the first album came out and I ran into him on the street and congratulated him on it. he looked at me like I was an alien. granted I was probably high.

I revived the other thread last year
POLL: Counting Crows - August & Everything After
also worth reading that Grantland piece I linked in there.

I have much love for this band. They are the band my big sis and I bonded over in the 90s and still text each other about every other month or so (she lives on the other side of the US). We've both been to CC gigs within the last year by ourselves and live texted each other throughout.

Brad and Spottie talking such a strong game that it makes me almost wanna do one of my periodic "check out music you used to really hate and see if you like it now" things

give it a shot!

I still love the first two records, the second one especially. I heard a song from the new one and it was pretty good! Will have to give the whole thing a listen.

I used to like them and have fondness for a few songs but aero your long post on another thread about your utter contempt for this band is some beautiful hating and I would be sad to see you renege on it.

ha those posts are great it's true! I will never feel the need to defend this band, tbf. Just one of those bands I like that I expect everyone else hates and I'm comfortable with that. Would be interested in hearing aero's thoughts on a re-listen tho, see if the hatred is too deep to approach this from a different angle.

Basically Spottie feels about Counting Crows the way I feel about Styx.

I will never feel the need to defend this band

yep

count me in. i actually liked large chunks of that covers record from a few years back. didn't even know a new one was due.

Recovering The Satellites is a wonderful album imo

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02539/duritz_2539013b.jpg

"Long December" playing in the hotel restaurant where I'm trying to eat breakfast. Truly, this is the worst music of all fucking time.

too many encores (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned) wrote this at 2012-12-17 17:13:11.000

I totally get how this is not breakfast music.

I totally get how this is not breakfast music.

and the feeling that it's all a lot of egg whites with no yolks

spottie what do you think of the new one

Bout to fire it up, will report back!

think "earthquake driver" is his best lyric overall in a while (saturday nights & sunday mornings was oddly both restrained and unhinged lyrically, duritz endlessly musing on "everything" and "nothing" which was pretty boring). think "dislocation" is my favorite song. think this is way better than saturday nights in general and really enjoy the expansive qualities of "palisades park" and "johnny appleseed's lament"

Listened a couple times.

God of the Ocean Tides (aka Dust in the Wind?) is really nice, as well as Possiblity Days. I think they do ballads as good as anyone. Palisades Park and John Appleseed's Lament are def standouts. The hook on Dislocation kinda grates but the rest is good, might grow on me. Kinda love the final third of this lp straight up. Even into the ragtime stomper 'cover up the sun'.

been spending a lot of time with the most recent one and it's better than I even gave it credit for at the time (I am weirdly, unnecessarily bet-hedging in this thread idk why)

been preaching to the already-converted for a while that hard candy is their best record if you delete the big yellow taxi cover from every layer of existence

I've always had a soft spot for their tune "Perfect Blue Buildings" as when I was in school I remember being dirty and dead tired washing dishes about 3am in the back of a restaurant/bar alone hearing it on this sad radio that was zip tied up above the 3 sink.

i associate those first albums really strongly with dirty teenage restaurant work, too. that stuff is probably too intertwined with certain memories for me to even really hear what it sounds like.

What I hate about them, much like Rob Thomas, is that Duritz's voice MAKES them MOR. He's like the anti-Fagen, whose voice IMO contrasts/complements nicely with all that Steely Dan sheen.

Duritz, instead, grounds everything in this horrible 'tastefulness' that is completely repellent IMO

I got basically no critical perspective, but whataya mean by tastefulness

I too am wondering

holiday in spain song is hitting me today
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJatv7CUhys

its a real damn shame the album didnt end with this song

#1 hit in Holland:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkErDMj1TW8

its a real damn shame the album didnt end with this song

― big city slam (Spottie), Thursday, July 11, 2019 12:27 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

afaic big ol taxi is a bonus track from hell

At least the original bonus track didn't have Vanessa Carlton on it, which always seemed like an odd addition.

afaic big ol taxi is a bonus track from hell

― american bradass (BradNelson), Thursday, July 11, 2019 12:52 PM (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

fair. song really set them back and killed what little reputation they had at that point.

#1 hit in Holland:

― ArchCarrier, Thursday, July 11, 2019 12:38 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

did not know!

At least the original bonus track didn't have Vanessa Carlton on it, which always seemed like an odd addition.

― MarkoP, Thursday, July 11, 2019 1:07 PM (fifty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

oooo bop bop bop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eexQVcLZV3Q

attn spottie, new counting crows EP is really awesome imo

yeah! listened to it on Friday. really love that first song. Need to spend more time w it.

no discussion anywhere on ILX of "Einstein on the Beach (For an Eggman)"? song rules IMHO, such a solid snappy college-rock riff, so much forward momentum, drumming rules, Duritz's wild vocal swings create hooks out of nearly nothing. "cracks his HEAD WIDE OPEN!!". apparently it was a big alt-rock radio hit, but either it has a short shelf life or my station just wasn't drinking the Crow-Aid cause i never heard it until idk a year or two ago. just did it at karaoke to try and get it unstuck from my head. dunno if it worked but it was fun to try.

It was the "Single" from DGC Rarities, a quickly forgotten V/A comp of demos/outtakes/odds'n'sods from Alt-Rockers in Geffen's stable (another selling point was the inclusion of Nirvana's demo of "Pay To Play"--aka "Stay Away" with inadvertently became the first new Nirvana product released after Cobain's suicide).

One of the CC guys wrote in the liners that "Einstein..." was a band favorite that the just couldn't get to fit into August..., and became a decent radio hit as the first new CC thing to stick after "Mr. Jones".

it's funny, the two big Recovering the Satellites singles were SO big on my station, and i had really just started tuning in in '95/'96... i feel like CC's earlier material has just been aggressively purged from the rotation.

I was a big fan of August... and have vivid memories of the first time I heard "Einstein on the Beach", walking in the campus bookstore.

seems like a good setting for it tbh!

"einstein" is one of their best!!!

the last two songs by CC I heard out in the wild were that, and Mr. Jones. It's been a long time since I have heard anything else randomly, I think.

I went on an inexplicable Counting Crows bender in 2022, the first two albums especially but there was something worth hearing on just about all their albums. Maybe it was hearing "Murder of One" or "Long December" in the grocery store or something. But after binging for like 14 months straight, I went to see them live and, wow, did that put an end to it. One of the most boring, lifeless displays I've paid for.

Before seeing them, on another thread, I did this POX and search/destroy.

POX:
Anna Begins
Sullivan Street
Raining in Baltimore
A Murder of One
Children in Bloom
Recovering the Satellites
Holiday in Spain
Hanging Around
St. Robinson In His Cadillac Dream
Miami

Search: "Shallow Days", "Hanging Tree", "Good Time"
Destroy: "Girl from the North Country", "Mean Jumper Blues","Butterfly in Reverse", "Another Horsedreamer's Blues", "Amy Hit the Atmosphere", Underwater Sunshine, the unplugged part of Across a Wire, esp "Round Here"...

Classic or Dud: Yes

"Good Time"

fucking AMAZING song, they should do more atmospheric pink floyd-ish stuff

i do really love "another horsedreamer's blues" it may be my favorite song on recovering

oh and

Miami

favorite cc song of all time, i think, if i'm having a nervous breakdown i'm usually listening to this song a lot

what more perfect rendezvous
the sundown paints the shadows through
the daylight, amy, on what we do

"i guess i think i feel all right" is an all-time opening line for me. adam duritz's memorable banalities

"Einstein" was definitely a radio hit AFTER "Round Here" and then, weirdly, "Einstein" became CC's only #1 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart around the same time "Rain King" got to #4 on Mainstream Rock. totally arbitrary divide, those songs are not aesthetically distinct from each other at all. and neither song had a video so i guess that freed stations up to decide which one they liked better instead of following MTV's lead.

I feel like Counting Crows are universally hated almost at a Nickelback meme-type level but I always had a soft spot for them…Recovering the Satellites was like my third CD and I was very into it at the time (I was a kid in the 90s), but I pulled it out again one of the last times that I got good and sloppy drunk (a few years back now) and listened to the entire thing and in that state at least it still held up very well. I even remember liking their third album (Desert Life?) decently at the time it came out.

I’m not pushing for a cultural reexamination by any means as this is more of a time and place thing for me (if I’d been in my teens by the time any of this came out I guarantee I wouldn’t feel the same way) but they really were a better band than they get credit for…there are certainly other 90s acts I’d put on the “deserve to be universally despised” list ahead of them.

It didn't help that Duritz was kind of a doofus, but I do think the hate leveled against them was pretty over the top. I still listen to them way more than most of the other bands from that time period.

I actually really liked their covers album from 2012.

"Einstein" was definitely a radio hit AFTER "Round Here" and then, weirdly, "Einstein" became CC's only #1 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart around the same time "Rain King" got to #4 on Mainstream Rock. totally arbitrary divide, those songs are not aesthetically distinct from each other at all. and neither song had a video so i guess that freed stations up to decide which one they liked better instead of following MTV's lead.

― some dude, Tuesday, 27 August 2024 15:04 (twenty-four minutes ago) link

kind of weird to me that DGC didn't shell out for a third video from August & Everything After

the band themselves are fine. I actually am friends with someone who was a founding member of the band that morphed into CC (and who originally wrote Round Here); Charlie Gillingham had a (very short) stint in American Music Club; David Immerglück was in Camper Van Beethoven; Jim Bogios is a great drummer who has played with a lot of people, including Sheryl Crow and Mark Eitzel. The cringe has always been around Duritz' white boy dreadlocks and his (perceived) Van Morrison rip off vocal stylings, and his dating Jennifer Aniston.

is dating jennifer aniston cringe? why?

i guess that makes Justin Theroux cringe

iirc, the cringe wasn't so much that he dated Aniston, but that he famously dated Aniston and Courtney Cox during the heights of Friends mania.

maybe he just wanted some Friends

xp doesn't that make it more cringe of Aniston and Cox to have dated him during that time period?

I mean, sure. If their dating lives mean that much to you?

famously, Steve Albini had refused to date Anston, Cox AND Nicole Kidman around that time

none of that dating stuff is frankly interesting and I don’t know why it’s all that relevant. Guy dated some celebrities during the peak of his fame. Big shocker.

maybe he just wanted some Friends

hahaha

famously, Steve Albini had refused to date Anston, Cox AND Nicole Kidman around that time

hmmm
oh
hahaha

I had never heard a Counting Crows album, just various singles, but my neighbor always plays music loud while working in his yard so today was the day. Adam Duritz’ constant straining a couple notes above his range to add “urgency” or whatever became more and more annoying to me over the course of an hour. Supremely annoying.

About three years ago I listened to ~a lot~ of Counting Crows. In the midst of the pandemic I guess I found Adam's urgency comforting. Dunno. Anyway, I even went to a concert and sprung for decent seats. It was one of the most boring, paint-by-numbers shows I've ever seen. Haven't sought them out much since, but at the end of that phase, I summarized them like this:

OPO:
Murder of One

POX:
Anna Begins
Sullivan Street
Raining in Baltimore
A Murder of One
Children in Bloom
Recovering the Satellites
Holiday in Spain
Hanging Around
St. Robinson In His Cadillac Dream
Miami

Search: "Shallow Days", "Hanging Tree", "Good Time"
Destroy: "Girl from the North Country", "Mean Jumper Blues","Butterfly in Reverse", "Another Horsedreamer's Blues", "Amy Hit the Atmosphere", Underwater Sunshine, the unplugged part of Across a Wire, esp "Round Here"...

Classic or Dud: Yes

omg don't destroy "another horsedreamer's blues"

"miami" in a POX is very very correct tho

we had this exact conversation nine month sago

oh gawd...sorry! should've scanned up

theres a few songs on the butter miracle album that im really loving