Counting Crows: Recovering The Satellites

Poor Counting Crows. After enjoying massive success with August and Everything After, the band has been chewed up by backlash: "Mr. Jones" was an annoyingly omnipresent single, while frontman Adam Duritz's mopey-doughboy persona was exaggerated by listlessly indifferent live performances. Add in a three-year wait between albums, and you've got a recipe for commercial disaster, but the new Recovering the Satellites isn't half bad. Don't forget that before it was overexposed and overanalyzed, August and Everything After was an impressive, dramatic debut that lent itself well to angst-filled late-night singalongs. And the new album displays some similarly effective vocal performances, particularly on "Catapult" and the single "Angels of the Silences." It's also got some dippy lyrics—like "I heard you let somebody get their fingers into you," and "I am the king of the rain"—but Counting Crows has always been about the way Duritz delivers his lines, not what they say. Recovering the Satellites is a solid follow-up, and though it drags at the end, it doesn't deserve the commercial burial that likely awaits it.