Counting Crows released their new EP last night: Butter Miracle Suite One (Spotify link here). I’ve listened through it once, but with “Elevator Boots” out for almost a month now, I’ve listened to that one a few times.
The EP’s four songs long, and they’re long songs, averaging just under five minutes a pop. The length seems to have given Adam Duritz some space to change direction, and you see that both in the space of a song—more than one rises into electric rock from a quiet opening—and the space of a stanza—Duritz noticeably inserts a line between two rhyming lines multiple times, withholding some satisfaction while drawing the listener (or reader) to the words that created the pause.
The EP starts with “The Tall Grass,” which shocks then guts with a gruesome, haunting depiction of a rabbit hunt framing a lament for those abused as children (which, given Duritz’s own dissociative disorder diagnoses, might well be a lament for his own life’s shadow). From there, it’s on to “Elevator Boots,” which we wrote about when it was released a few weeks ago—the sort of personal yet faceless, adventuring western desert glide that sounds so much like home out of this band. “Angel of 14th Street” is up third, and while the allegory’s too allegorical to feel, after one listen, any certainty about who or what is the angel and who or what is her abuser and who or what is her other abuser (“the congregation”), there’s a lot happening there lyrically, so if you’re an English major and you can write a paper on a song, go at it. (Is this about Trump? This feels like it might be about Trump.) The dissonant clashing guitars hold echoes from the Saturday Night half of Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings. The trumpet interlude feels closest to Somewhere Under Wonderland but stands distinct from that. Finally, there’s “Bobby and the Rat-Kings,” which has been compared to Springsteen, which is an apt comparison. At first listen, at least, it sounds like Counting Crows doing Springsteen, and not doing it too badly in a song seemingly about Duritz’s generation struggling to live in a new time, with the fictional titular band holding the hopes of a narrator or narrators wanting to escape into a city life of their past.
That, at least, is my read on it all, and again, I’ve listened to three of the songs just once, so go get your own read if you want one. In terms of pure enjoyment, there are a few portions of “Elevator Boots” and “Bobby and the Rat-Kings” which give you the kind of satisfactory hit in your chest familiar from place after place in their discography, but even those are a different sound than you’d get twenty years ago, because now is not twenty years ago. In terms of lyrical depth, my recency bias may be overwhelming my perception but it’s hard to remember a quartet of songs in succession like this that held so much, and that’s from a band from whom every quartet of songs holds a lot.
