I’m digging on the new Counting Crows disc Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings. I was a little bit bummed initially, because I thought the album was going to be a real “double album.” When I hear double album, I think of CD 1 and CD 2, and even when you have an album like Wilco’s Being There, which runs a bit short…..it’s still actually two whole CDs of material.

Instead, the Counting Crows disc is thematically broken up into 2 seven song blocks, clocking in at just under an hour. The first half has some of the heaviest guitar riffing that I have heard from the band in years. If you think of the unexpected ferocity of Angels of The Silences, which was the lead single for Recovering The Satellites, the material on Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings is similarly jarring in the way that some of that RTS material was. What it lacks however, is clarity in the overall audio mix in my opinion. The electric material seems to overpower the musical soundstage resulting in a muddy musical mix at times. From a song standpoint, these are some of the finest songs from Counting Crows that I’ve heard in years. Any complaints that I had about the overall audio mix vanished as I made my way through the rest of the album, and by the time I made it to the end of the quieter side of the album, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings had officially gotten its hooks into me, and as a result, I’ve been listening to the album quite a bit over the past day. The scattered musical bits that I heard live this past summer, and also via the MP3 downloads released by the band of studio tracks really hadn’t grabbed me. Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings is an album that is best when experienced in full. You’re not going to get it from the selected sampling you’ve heard in the singles – you’ve got to hear the full thing on this one.

Overall, I’m going to call Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings the best album that Counting Crows have released since Recovering The Satellites. It’s good.

The band hits the road this summer with Maroon 5 and Sara Bareilles. Stoked about the Sara part, not so stoked about the Maroon 5 part. I hope that Maroon 5 will close the show here in the Cleveland area, so I can leave early.

Please?