You know that hyper-literate cousin of yours from the big city? <\/p>\n
The one you only see at weddings and funerals, who after a drink or two can talk you under the table about basically any subject on the face of the earth, who\u2019s read everything ever written by Baudelaire and Kant and every other pseudo-hip intellectual in the history of Western civilization? He can recite poems by Shelley or jokes by Woody Allen, soliloquize on the finer points of the 19th<\/sup> century cubists or late 1970s underground punk. You sometimes wonder that his head doesn\u2019t simply explode from all of the random information that seems to be knocking around inside it. At times his hyperactive monologues assume the velocity of some kind of hip-hop savant. <\/p>\n He can drive you a little bit crazy sometimes with the uniqueness of his gift, but you also pretty much have to admire the guy, because he is clearly gifted and quite brilliant in his own colorful way. It\u2019s just that he\u2019s best experienced in relatively small doses, and in the right mood and setting.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t have a cousin like that, but every time I\u2019ve put a new Counting Crows record on in the last ten years or so, I kind of feel that way.<\/p>\n In early days, Crows frontman\/lyricist Adam Duritz applied his gift of gab to songs that fit snugly within the pop-rock paradigm of verses and choruses and melodies and harmonies and instrumental breaks. These days, the rest of the Crows (David Bryson, Charles Gillingham, Dan Vickery, David Immergl\u00fcck, Millard Powers and Jim Bogios) are more typically overwhelmed by the sheer scope and density of his extended monologues; these aren\u2019t songs so much as they are explosions of words and thoughts and images and ideas.<\/p>\n There were times listening to this album when I wanted to shout at my speakers \u201cDude, slow down! Give us a minute to absorb that thing you just said before you throw seven more at us! Because that one thing you said was actually pretty interesting and maybe a little bit profound, but man, you just won\u2019t stop for a minute and let us really hear<\/i> it.\u201d<\/p>\n Kickoff cut \u201cPalisades Park\u201d is a nine minute mini-epic poem of a tune that feels at times like Beat poetry set to roots-rock, The Hold Steady fronted by the ghosts of Allen Ginsberg and young Bob Dylan. It\u2019s genuinely sprawling, and also somehow nostalgic, carrying echoes of Born To Run<\/i>-era Springsteen in its rather \u201cBackstreets\u201d-like narrative of young Andy chasing his fate through streets filled with characters with names like \u201cWild Mouse\u201d and the \u201cWhite Queens.\u201d<\/p>\n Like several tunes here, second song \u201cEarthquake Driver\u201d references California, from whence Duritz moved to New York in 2003. \u201cEarthquake Driver\u201d is in fact the highlight of the album, featuring a snappy acoustic funk vibe, hip-hop diction and the verbosity of a Manhattan intellectual. It\u2019s also where Duritz makes his most direct and moving statement, crying repeatedly \u201cI just don\u2019t wanna go home\u201d without explicitly defining where home is; he misses California, yes, but he\u2019s running away from something, rather than toward any particular destination. <\/p>\n