WTF, Mate?: Random Shit for the Week........

Ugly Car of the Week –

Jeep Compass.

Really? Another Jeep model? What is this supposed to be – a mini version of the Cherokee? An upgraded smaller rounded-corners version of the Wrangler? A kid’s Libery? A Patriot? Hmmm? I’m confused. Answer me that one Chrysler. How many fucking jeepy-SUV models do you really need? No wonder your profits for Q1 2008 stunk like a dead skunk… Oh, and by the way, fire the person in charge of styling. This thing is ugly.

Frustrating Song Of The Week -

“Say What You Need To Say” or whatever the fuck it’s called by Jon Mayer. OK then Jon, instead of saying what you need to say 39 fucking times just say it already. Chorus repeat x24 is a little boring fade to close. Piss off.

Subtle musical disappointment of the week –

“Pretty.Odd” by Panic at the Disco. Pretty fucking odd, indeed. Sgt Peppers on Vicodin, perhaps? Whatever it is it isn’t the Panic that I was expecting. I don’t care if Fall Out Boy copied you mercilessly, at least they still sound good. Poncy wankers. Go be explorative on your own time and when you’re done, come on back with some music we really want to hear.

Book Of The Week –

“War Stories II – Heroism in the Pacific” by Oliver North and some other dude. Intriguing short capsules of the major campaigns in the Pacific theater plus the obligatory first-hand accounts. Pretty good actually but to tell you the truth I am just biding my time until I get “Six Bad Things” by Charlie Huston from the library…

Subtle musical intrigue of the week –

“Saturday Nights, Sunday Mornings” by Counting Crows. Ass-kickingly good. So good that any review I can possibly do stinks compared to this one (courtesy of AllMusic.com):

After 2002's Hard Candy with its hit single "American Girls," which was used in a television commercial, followed by a best-of and a live offering, it seemed that just maybe the Counting Crows had said everything they needed to and may have simply slipped quietly into rock & roll history. Not so. Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is a reminder, in many ways, of just how special this band is at their best. As a group whose debut album, August and Everything After, sold over 15 million copies, was released to such widespread critical acclaim in 1993, and was easily their most commercially successful offering ever, they are one of the few bands that still exist, let alone have a following. They sounded out of time then, with their roots stuck deep in rock's past, where songwriting craft, excellent musicianship, focused production, and wide-ranging aesthetic ambition resulted in carefully constructed, poetic, and sometimes over-thought albums. Not surprisingly, they still sound that way, and that's a good thing. Their music touches on everything from the Beatles to the Band, from Bob Dylan and Van Morrison to early R.E.M. and Tunnel of Love-era Bruce Springsteen. Don't be surprised to read and hear critics bemoaning that music like this in the 21st century has no place in the American pop pantheon. That's nonsense.

The album is a kind of concept offering: it is divided into halves denoted by the title, and it has two producers. Gil Norton handled the first six cuts (Saturday Night), and the album's closer, and Brian Deck the remainder (Sunday Morning). Over an hour and 15 songs, CC dig deep into the theme of Saturday night, which just might be the loneliest night of the week, and the protagonists in these songs are devoted to obliteration, wasted desire, and isolation in the midst of a world that seems to be enjoying itself. The protagonists in these first six songs are looking for connection and community through every means necessary, but it is always just out of reach. Self-hatred, a brazenly honest expression of self-loathing, and the obsessive, urgent drive to blot it out fuel every song on this half of the recording. The second half is informed by the sick, bleary, light-of-day regret that is realized amid a hung-over dystopia that these feelings have only been stripped to the raw marrow by the previous night's excursions into pleasures and deluded ideas of meaning via looking for emotional and psychic redemption in all the wrong places. It refuses to succumb to complete despair, but it comes oh so desperately close.

The set comes roaring out of the gate with urgent rolling snare drums and enormous guitars creating a pulpit of overdriven rock & roll crackle that allows the protagonist to shout from a street corner, a piss-stained doorway, or a rusty fire escape perch, at passersby who scurry quickly by, shaking their heads at the madness in dingy prophet who might just be a reincarnated Hubert Selby, Jr scribbling his character studies orally. He's a "Russian Jew American/Impersonating African Jamaican/What I wanna be's an Indian/I'm gonna be a cowboy in the end." His companions are "skinny girls who drink champagne, go down on him and drag him past the grittier side of night/past railway cars and tranny whores/and morning spreading out across the feathered thighs of angels." That's just the setting for the truth that this character lays out: "Where do we disappear? Into the silence that surrounds us/And then drowns us in the end./Where they push you out to keep you in/And say, 'Come again...' He's the king of everything because he's the king of nothing."

Sure it's frontman Adam Duritz at his most unhinged and exposed, soaring above a band that understands every utterance of every syllable he's letting pour out of his mouth like poetically inspired vomit. And sometimes poetry is vomit. The brooding opening in "Hanging Tree" lays a foundation for the sheer nakedness and anger of the protagonist, who claims without irony that: "I am a child of Fire/I am a lion/I have desires/And I was born inside the sun this morning/This dizzy life of mine keeps hanging me up all the time," and this is what sets this disc apart from anything in the Counting Crows past. There is a directness here that paints vivid vignettes; pictures that the listener can take in, can empathize with — but that's not the point. These songs, particularly the rockers on the first half, like the previous two tunes, the loose, country rock groove of "Los Angeles," the skittering, "Walk on the Wild Side"-inspired swagger of Sunday, that's tempered by the Baroque pop of Boyce & Hart in the refrain and the bridge, containing an urgency and freedom this band hasn't shown with this kind of focus. One thing is for sure: this may have been truly mainstream rock & roll in the 1970s, but in an era where the charts are as likely to place Flogging Molly and Nickelback in the Top 40, this is outsider music.

The album's second half is, expectedly, less urgent, and has a more reflective focus. Though "Washington Square" is a respite, reflecting the not-quite-light-yet return home, it's a likely descendent of Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Comin' Down." It's layered with hovering pianos, atmospheric ambient sounds, a lone finger-picked acoustic guitar with other acoustic stringed instruments like a banjo, a 12-string, a harmonica, standup bass, and hushed drums, which reflect the opening of the new day as the most beautiful and desolate place on earth. It's the briefest moment of peace, and Duritz makes the most of it. "On Almost Any Sunday Morning," with its ghostly harmonica, 12-string guitar, and elemental backdrop music, the light of day becomes the most unbearable period of separation, regret, and recrimination on the album. The singer isn't looking for Jesus, he's looking into the endless mirror of the soul. That tenet of honesty that runs through every song here can make it seem as if Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is an hour-long confessional. But it's not because the people who inhabit these songs are all different individuals in various states of being. Lost in the void of pain, substance abuse, dissociation, blame, and self-examination, these glimmers of poets, lonely gods and angels, enemies, friends, and the clear view of the walls between the individual and the community, the individual and the Divine, and the individual from her or himself, are profound. This is roots music, where mandolins, pianos, cellos, a fiddle, and restrained drums are the most painterly and expertly executed musical frames for these songs. The Fender Rhodes in "Anyone But You" carries a bit of the perversity of its lyric. But it's the stinging single, "You Can't Count on Me," with its lithe piano lines, and woven six-string acoustics introduced only after jagged lead lines. At the end of the verse, where the protagonist confesses he knows just what a creep he really is without a hint of being patronizing — Dan Vickrey and David Immerglück's guitars push Adam Duritz to spill it all and he finally does: "I watch all the same parades/As they pass by on the days that you wish you'd stayed/But this pain gets me high/And I get off and you know why/So if you think you need to go/ If you wanted to be free/There's just one thing you need to know/You can't count on me." This is followed by "Le Ballet d'Or," a song that recalls in its refrain and in its direct revelation Blind Faith's "I Can't Find My Way Home."

Who are these unsightly, disturbed people? And why are their stories and private confessions framed in the most empathic, insistent, and sometimes utterly gorgeous music to come from a big-time music studio in a dog's age? They are you. They are us, just as we are — at least some of the time. Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings will most likely be a deeply misunderstood and unappreciated offering by a band that has no idea how to do anything but be itself. Counting Crows have finally given us the true other side of August and Everything After, where questions become answers we don't want to hear. The evidence is in the last track, the rocker "Come Around." It's the sum of all the ambiguous tales from those earlier records, where the manic, wild-eyed girls and wandering rock & roll boys looking for beauty get older, but don't necessarily grow up. Now they have to answer for broken love, wasted life, and day-to-day loneliness where the price regret extracts doesn't bring redemption, and looking to the horizon brings only a reflection in a dirty window. Is there a choice to do anything but do it over and again in a ragged, ever shrinking circle? Rock & roll can't answer that, and the Counting Crows know better than to provide a simple silver lining. Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is a rock record in the grandest and most polished sense of the word: it wears its lineage proudly, and imparts emotions directly and brazenly honestly no matter how pretty or shiny the picture is. The kids may not understand, but they don't have to.