The warring faces of Counting Crows

Has there ever been a band to so delicately tip-toe and pirouette along the line between unforgiveably naff and somewhat cool as Counting Crows? Picture when they first appeared in the early 1990s with 'Mr Jones', a decent pop song but with a video that made them look as cool as a still-warm freshly-dead rat; the horrific evidence can be seen here. I remember being vaguely aware of them when they sauntered onto the so-called scene, but they first made an impression anonymously by hearing their album unbenownst to themselves and myself in a bar, and asking after being impressed who it was, to be told it was Counting Crows. I still remember buying 'August and everything after' in HMV in Grafton Street in Dublin, on cassette, and walking along one of the side streets that led to my favoured assortment of book shops, when 'Round here' almost stopped me in my tracks and left my jaw gaping somewhat comically.

Here is the Counting Crows paradox in a nutshell:

On the con side:
1 They look crap
2 Their name is crap
3 They are a hair's breath away from being Hootie and the Blowfish or one of a million other anonymous guitar bands

But, on the pro side
1 An occasionally astonishing way with melody
2 Adam Duritz's voice
3 Repeat 1 and 2 ad infinitum

The pros win; the cons are amateurs. Their debut, the aforementioned 'August etc.', is simply one of my top 20 albums of all time. I have seen Duritz interviewed and he does not always come across particularly endearingly, but on song his voice does it for me every time, the way it just sometimes comes close to cracking like his heart is crumbling in hurricane. I heard something about him having a condition which makes empathy difficult, but his songs to me and in particular his delivery make this almost possible to comprehend. The way he sings lines like 'she has trouble acting normal – I have trouble acting normal' and (in particular) 'she's always on my mind' in 'Round here'. 'Round here' can be heard here, and a live version seen at:

Another truly great song on the debut is 'Anna begins' which again mixes the touching ('every time she sneezes, I believe it's love, and oh lord I'm not ready for this sort of thing', 'cos if it's love, then we're going to have to think about the consequences, and she can't stop shaking, and I can't stop touching her...') with the banal and bizarre ('her kindness bangs a gong, it's moving me along') but mostly stays in the right side of gorgeous as it builds to a great crescendo. It can be seen here:

Finally, 'Raining in Baltimore' with its plaintive vocals and simple piano tune is just forlorn and lovely - a live version with some of 'A long December' is below:

Live, Counting Crows seem to constantly battle between their rock and their unplugged natures (their most recent album 'Saturday night and Sunday morning' was based around the admission of this tension), and this, mixed with an apparent determination never to play the same song the same way twice, makes the versions on the acoustic side of their early live album 'Across a wire' of several of the 'August' songs well worth catching.

I will come back to their later albums later (hence the name) as all bear moments of tender beauty and musical magic and melodrama amidst the rockist noisiness, but for now just want to celebrate their undeniably impressive debut.

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A perfectly framed image (and album)

Depeche Mode - A Broken Frame

Just look at the image above - what an album cover! Initially, of course, it was intended to appear in full twelve-inch square glory on a real album cover, being released in 1982, but successive versions on tape, CD and download have progressively reduced, stretched and digitised its glory. I must admit that I always, without thinking too hard, assumed it was a painting, perhaps by some 16-17th-Century Dutch painter, like Rembrandt or Vermeer; while the colours were too, well, colourful, for most of what I associated with that time, the costume and general epic gloominess of the piece, one peasant hapless in the face of the oncoming thunderstorm, seemed to fit the era and country (does anyone else think that moving from punishing puritanism to pot'n'porn in just a few short centuries seems a lot like cultural overcompensation by the Dutch, as if so embarrassed by their conservative history that they have sprinted to the opposite liberal extreme?). Anyway, it turns out (of course) that it is a photo, and modern, and taken not far off the M11 or somewhere. Doesn't reduce the majesty altogether, but maybe just chews away a tiny bit.

But what about the music it adorns? The album is Depeche Mode's 'A broken frame', which they apparently regard as their worst and tend to generally disown (given their favourite colour scheme over the decades, they may well regard it as the white sheep of their family), but I regard it as my favourite synth-pop album of the early 1980s (and there we lots of them around at the time).

I was 13 when it was released, and didn't but my first LP until around 1985; I think, God help me, that that landmark may have been the Thomson Twins' 'Into the Gap', but I did recover somewhat with my second investment, Alphaville's 'Forever Young', which still sounds very good to my ears (I was relieved recently, after buying it on CD in a fit of nostalgia, to read the Allmusic Guide referring to it as a landmark album of the time, and the title track is surely some sort of sadcore classic).

'A broken frame' wasn't even the first Depeche Mode album I bought, that honour going to 'Some great reward' (which contains the jawdropping 'Somebody', which still sends shivers up and down my spine every time I hear it, particularly the live version on '101'). Conventional wisdom may have put their early phase as their most poppy and light, but I find 'A broken frame' to be as overcast in mood as the sky on its cover, with an overhanging gloom and angst permeating the lyrics and unperpinning the superficially shiny synths, and most songs running over 4 minutes long; in fact, the cover is a very apt metaphor for the album's mood, with a dark pall hanging over a colourful spot, the light retracting in the growing shadow.

The album is a break-up album, and most songs are about missing, losing or leaving someone, with references to 'emotional violence' stabbing though the songs like purified crystalline angst (typical other line: 'Now hear this my friends. I'll never be the same again. Gonna lock myself in a cold black room. Gonna shadow myself in a veil of gloom'). Even 'See you', which sounds at first listen like the happiest poppiest Depeche Mode song, rings with sorrow and pain at missing someone in a way that makes me feel like a crap confused teenager all over again. A really old clip of them doing the song on the legendary music show 'The tube' can be seen below (by God, they look young, and so far from their black and leather era):

The key track is the closing 'The sun and the rainfall ', which is surely, after 'Somebody', their greatest moment; the initial drum machine buildup and climactic vocal interplay are just epic. A (presumably unofficial but interesting) video is at:

It is strange that, despite the fact that my turning 21 coincided with the start of my enduring relationship with music with guitars, I can still go back and listen to a completely synthesised album like this one now and, whether through nostalgia or what, just love the sound. Listening to the album again recently, I have even found myself frequently humming the instrumental 'Nothing to fear', as it worked into my brain and refused to leave.

This is another of those occasional posts where I just rabbit on about albums which have made a significant and lasting impact on me; chronologically speaking, this is a perfect place to start.

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The darkest part of the cave

While rummaging through various bits and pieces rapidly accumulating on my shiny new Sky-plus box, I found and watched a BBC special on Glastonbury (mostly at fast forward, to avoid losing my eyesight through looking directly for too long at Tom Jones), and stopped abruptly at the appearance of Nick Cave; that man and his band could stop traffic, let alone a remote control. The first track shown was ‘Red right hand’, never one of my favourites, but the subsequent performance of ‘Mercy seat’ took my breath away, and needs to be seen here. Not appearing on Youtube (yet?) I scoured the vast plains of the internet more widely and found it on Vimeo (new to me!), from which the embed below comes.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Mercy Seat (Pro Shot, Glastonbury 2009) from maicasajusta on Vimeo.

Look at that! Look at those terrifying and grizzled men, and try and work out how they can in theory belong to the same employment and planet as people who appear in the charts today or on X-factor. Look at Warren Ellis’ biblical beard and those two mad drummers (this song has always been driven and its dark mood dominated by drums), and Cave himself (definitely better without the moustache) like a mad and deadly spider, attacking the keyboard beside him reluctantly but dramatically at key moments. And, of course, just listen to that song, and the apocalyptic confluence of music and lyrics, and the chant of doom into which the song builds, with the cycles of chorus going round and round like a doomed madman circling his cell while the hour of execution approaches. This is clearly not a song designed for daylight, which ill-fits the performance – the darker live version below works in some ways more explicitly; it is like the difference between watching ‘The exorcist’ in the afternoon or at night with the lights off.



Of course, as I have mentioned several times before on this blog, one of the most fascinating things about Cave is the difference between this kind of loud demonic scariness (albeit always melodic and lyrical and with an undeniable dark black beauty) and the Cave that can create things of soft and gentle beauty like the first six tracks of ‘The boatman’s call’, much of ‘No more shall we part’ and some of ‘Nocturama’ (especially ‘He wants you’). No artist, as I have said before, swings between such extremes of light and shade, and below is a version of this song which is delivered solo at the piano (by an unusually neat looking Nick, definetely the good cop to his own bad cop in the clips above), and crosses the lines between dark Cave and bright Cave, like a concert at the line on the moon which divides the light and dark sides.



There is also a lovely acoustic version of this on Cave’s B-sides and rarities compilation from a few years ago. To finish, I will offer a fourth version of the song, but give Nick a break, by showing Johnny Cash’s famous interpretation, which places the song in a while different, ancient and biblical, context, still scary but in a calmer, more deliberate, and infinitely more weary way, like the difference between Robert De Niro (Cave) and Joe Pesci (Cave) in ‘Goodfellas’.



As a final thought, I would almost seem more fitting if the song was originally Cash’s, with Cave the cover version, so entirely at home does it seem within the older outlaw country tradition within which Cash came to his tremendous power. How would this song have rung through the halls of San Quentin prison, I wonder? Click Here to Read More..

A review: Josh Ritter Live in Cork

Last night, I was at the Josh Ritter gig in the Marquee in Cork and want to post a quick review. The Marquee is a large tent, and tonight was full of many people intent on having the usual euphoric experience that is one of this guy's gigs. Now, having got that dreadful pun out of my system, I will get to the review. I think the Marquee is a good venue for gigs because (a) it is around 10 times bigger than anywhere else Cork has to offer and (b) the sound is actually good for a large bloody circus tent. Over the years, I have seen great gigs by Nick Cave, the Flaming Lips and Antony and the Johnsons there. Tonight, it was Josh's turn.

First, we had Lisa Hannigan in support, whose album 'Sea sew' had never honestly done much for me, bar the wonderful 'Ocean and a rock'; the rest seemed somewhat theatrical and artificial to me, but live she was a much more intriguing prospect, with a great voice and an interestingly awkward and hence sympathetic demeanour (her Ian-Curtis-like marching on the spot dancing was quite unexpected); I am certainly inclined to give the album more listens now, and perhaps go and see her indoors in a much smaller venue, where she is said to thrive.

Then Josh himself came on and played from 8.55 to 10.40 or so, accompanied by the Corkestra (?!), a 24-piece orchestra plus his own normal touring band, with everyone very natty in suits and ties. This was maybe my sixth or seventh time to see him live, mostly in Cork, and he has always professed great fondness for Cork, which he nicely brought in by a short pre-first-song list of dates (plus who he supported, or who supported him, which was a very nice touch) of each gig he has done in Cork since first coming here with the Frames in 2001 or so.

This sort of leads to the main Josh conundrum; if he was not quite so utterly nice, would he be bigger in critical terms? I can never quite place him into a neat category, which I think is one of the problems. He is a very talented musician and song-writer who can write deep heavy songs ('Bone of song', 'Thin blue flame'), and whose music, despite his Irish links, remains as pure a case of Americana in its influences and references (his songs are scattered with American historical nods) as anything more traditionally classed as Americana, if not quite classifiable as alt-country. On the other hand, he smiles a lot and can seem to effortlessly throw off great pop songs in a way that most of his more serious contemporaries could or would not deign to do, and which seems to rule him out of the 'folk' crowd entirely. The question, so, is whether he would be taken more seriously if he had a more tortured air about him (like Lisa Hannigan's former partner in song), or whether he should ditch the serious side and crowd-surf into the arms ot teen pop acclaim. By refusing to choose either path, but to walk instead the fine line between, he remains an equally admirable and likable phenomenon, no mean feat.

In the Marquee gig, he brought a 24-piece orchestra with him. I saw him in Vicar Street in Dublin in December 2008 with (the same?) orchestral backing, and somehow the orchestration was more in-your-face on that occasion than last night (they seemed to sit out more songs at the Cork gig), perhaps because of physical distance from the stage; we were seated in the stands, as can be seen by the fairly crap video quality my N95 could manage on zoom, although the audio quality was as good as ever and the main reason for my uploading the clips here (think of the video clips perhaps as an impressionistic portrait of the gig, with blotchy pointillistic bursts of colour triggered by the impressive light show, a modern gig as it would perhaps be depicted by Monet, if he were making videos today). The set was fairly familiar from gigs of the last few years, although he did not start with 'Idaho' as he seems to often do. Highlights for me included a particularly wonderful version of 'The temptation of Adam', which is one of my favourite of his songs, mainly for the lyrics and the story they tell, which I absolutely love; a video clip follows:

'Kathleen' was predictably a crowd-pleasing sing-along and involved the conductor 'conducting' the audience (see below), as in Vicar Street (I actually put a clip of that song from that gig on a post a while ago here), while he did 'Bone of song' with a solo violinist, which was very cool.

Having an orchestra who can't easily get up and walk away kind of removes any slight air of mystery about whether there will be encores or not, and for the closing 'Empty hearts' he brought back on Lisa Hannigan and her band for a sort of mass sing-along celebratory ending, again contrasting with the sole intensity of some of his quieter stuff in a way which neatly encapsulated the enigmatic duality of Mr Ritter.

Two final thoughts:

1. I find really interesting the fact that he is currently deconstructing his songs in two completely different and diametrically opposing directions from their original band format. Zooming up the scale is the use of the orchestra live, but zooming down strips them back to solo acoustic versions of his first two albums (so far) which have been released in the last few months. These special editions, in very nicely packaged sets ('Hello starling' has just been released and the copy I bought last night was pre-autographed by the man himself - see opposite for the proof) feature the original album plus the solo version, and it is interesting to hear big big songs like 'Snow is gone' sounding as if recorded by the Scud Mountain Boys in a big echoey barn. Again, not something many of his contemporaries would do, and the experiment is all the more welcome for it.

2. He has made clear at several gigs in the last few years his issues with the Bush adminsitration, and took the opportunity last night (4th of July!) to indicate that he was far more content now, and marked the occasion with his own violin version of the 'Star Spangled Banner' (which he said was his first time playing violin on stage), ending in a very dramatic appearance by the star of the song itself. He did pretty good if I am any judge, but you can judge for yourself below.

p.s. my last post was about the new Wilco album; since that post, and until yesterday and my attempt to reacquaint myself with Lisa Hannigan, I have listened to nothing else. It gets better every time, and is definitely their best and my album of the year so far, by an incredibly long shot.

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