Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings Atlanta GA

Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings

Counting Crows

Geffen Records, 2008

http://www.countingcrows.com

REVIEW BY: Jason Warburg

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 06/30/2008

Someday, Counting Crows will make an uncomplicated album.

Yeah, right. And pigs will fly, and George W. Bush will admit a mistake.

It could happen -- theoretically, at least -- but it’s pretty damned unlikely. The Crows had made four studio albums coming into 2008, and every one of them has contained moments of transcendent musical brilliance, exceptional songwriting supported by an killer ensemble that handles loud and quiet and loose and tight with equal aplomb. And yet each album, like a diamond, has been somehow flawed.

Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings keeps the string going. It’s perhaps the band’s most ambitious disc, a carefully shaped and focused concept album about dissolution and hope. And, like its predecessors, it too wears its flaws with pride, like the painter with a splotch of purple still on his cheek when the gallery doors open.