A jubilant return with all the fear that’s fit to print.
Fading glory in Oklahoma, the modern panopticon of the surveillance state, “we are dissolving from night to morning and I want to believe in something”. Counting Crows’ first studio album in 11 years packs a punch. Despite the long hiatus, the band’s storytelling ability remains commanding as ever, delivering five new songs as a follow-up to the 2021 EP “Butter Miracle, Suite One”.
Obviously the world looks a lot different than it did in 2014 with “Somewhere Under Wonderland”, and this new release is maniacally self-aware of that. “Can you hear the sirens? / Mister, have you seen the news?” Adam Duritz wails in ‘Boxcars’. Well of course we’ve seen it, and yeah, we really are “sick of everything”. “Butter Miracle” is both a sign of the times and a glimpse into the fading past.
Feeling adrift amidst the change, whether on a grand scale or in your own mind has remained a continuum for Duritz. However cloying and put-upon it might have been in the past, Counting Crows’ sadness has felt perfectly self-indulgent for all the times you couldn’t catch a break. “I can always hear a freight train, baby, if I listen real hard”, towards the end of 1993’s ‘Raining in Baltimore’ summed it up wonderfully: a lot of life is just trying to catch up to where you think you should be. So of course ‘Virginia Through the Rain’ is a wonderful follow-up from that: “You grab your phone and text the lie that you’re where you’re supposed to be this time”, doubly functions as a meditation on the aimlessness as Duritz observes that “for every ark you fill, there’s a hole you never will inside”.
The times when we did feel complete seem distant now, reflected in ‘Spaceman in Tulsa’. “Man, I was the toast of the town / Back when everyone knew where to go”, Duritz sings from the perspective of Bobby, who appears in ‘The Tall Grass’ and later emerges as the titular rockstar on the Springsteen-esque ‘Bobby and the Rat-Kings’. In one of the album’s highlights, ‘Under The Aurora’, we imagine “the king is on the roof… posed in a black collapsing universe… a sad reminder of the things we fell in love with yesterday”. The torch of the radio telling you how to act is then passed to Twitch streamers and “the siren sings of occupation and a future in the mines”. Tomorrow’s uncertainty is so terrifying in late-stage capitalism hell that even singing of yesterdays in act of defiance is monetised: “this band is free for all the groovers but the rest of you can pay”.
Drawing upon modern fears and anxieties, “Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets” is an excellent return for Counting Crows. If at times, the references are hyper-contemporary (i.e. a lyric about Reddit and Tinder), the album succinctly embodies the anxiety and restlessness of the cultural landscape, and does it with such catchiness and joy, it’ll be hard to get it out of your head.
