AUDIO: Recovering the Satellites

The track I chose to debut was "Catapult", the slow-building anthem that kicks off the disc. To my surprise, it was roundly panned or ignored by our audience. One listener even complained that it sounded "too much like the Beatles". So, out it went, never to be heard on our station again (unless I snuck it back in for an unauthorized spin). The album, as you may recall, spawned four radio hits and eventually went double-platinum. So much for the tastes of our audience...

While August and Everything After remains the quintessential Counting Crows album, I've always been more partial to this, their sophomore effort. Darker and, in many ways, deeper than August, it's both more experimental and more tightly wound than their previous effort. It also marked their last bout of coherence before slipping into unfocused mediocrity with This Desert Life. If August mapped the great aimless expanse of the modern west, Satellites depicts the modern west's final days, its last gasps before being paved over in the name of "progress". Frontman Adam Duritz preaches his unique blend of cowboy psychology and self-loathing, wailing plaintively through tracks about girlfriends past and present, self perception and the dead hometowns we all leave but can never seem to escape from. He does it all accompanied by his expansive band, flocked by pedal steel, electric guitar and the occasionally jaunty, occasionally sobering piano. And, unlike fellow professional neurotics Morrissey and Robert Smith, Duritz and his band actually make the process of owning up to one's personal shortcomings feel both epic and galvanizing.

For an album that boasts half a dozen songs everyone has heard on the radio at one point or another, it's difficult to discern exactly why some of Recovering the Satellites' songs hit and some missed, and some were overlooked completely. "Long December" and the unusually hard-rocking (for the Crows, at least) "Angels of the Silences" are easy home runs, but the fame-conscious "Have You Seen me Lately?" and the country-swathed "Daylight Fading", albeit one of my own favorite tracks, each seem like less obvious choices for singles. More puzzling is why a tender, shopworn ballad like "Goodnight Elisabeth" (refreshingly low on Duritz's pap) or the truly invigorating title track weren't given the same commercial push. The Crows' attention to detail has always been one of their trademarks, even in their least consequential tracks. It's as if they record every song as if it may be a single -- which, given the album's potluck single selection pattern, may be a wise approach. Even throwaway album chaff like "Monkey" is relatively harmless and features a stray winning guitar riff and a few clever lyrics, redeeming it from the slush pile.

I've listened to this album countless times over the past eight years -- enough to recognize both its underappreciated genius and its all-too-obvious shortcomings. Duritz, for all his armchair poetry, is a limited lyricist who clings desperately to the faded western motif ("dust", "bones" and "rain" figure prominently in almost every track) and whose vocal range is sadly restricted to mournful wails or self-conscious mutterings. He's the only singer I can think of who inspires both a spiritual kinship and the desire to kick his ass, probably because he reminds me of my own inner doubts and second-guessing. And the tale of a horseracing addict that is "Another Horsedreamer's Blues" is pretentious, even for the Crows, beginning what I see as the decline of Duritz's ability to paint accurate portraits of the down and out. However, the string-and-organ intro is still catchy as hell, which pretty much sums up the whole of Recovering the Satellites: even at its worst, it's filled with solid (if overwrought) musicianship and that escapist quality that only Duritz himself can offer -- the ability to turn drunken self-hatred into a parlor game.

-- Justin Kownacki