August and Everything After - Counting Crows (1993)
Mr. Jones is firmly established in the “grocery store canon” of songs that you hear in pieces in the background at the grocery store or the eye doctor or whatever. But if that’s all you know about this album, I am here to evanglize.
The rhythms on this album are what stuck out to me immediately. They sound like what you might think is typical, but most of the tracks never quite coalesce into something you’d expect.
Then you start to listen to the lyrics. Songs of yearning and loss and hope and reckoning that singer Adam Duritz delivers plaintively, like a friend talking to you in a bar.
There’s an amazing similarity in the content and even the vocal delivery with one of my other favorite 1993 albums, The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen. Both records speak to the the feeling of unease and barely contained rage, the confusion of being out in the world without a safety net. The difference is that while that other record assaults you with that confusion and rage, this one works to find a way through it. It’s a remarkable trick, and maybe one that could only be pulled off on a debut record.
T Bone Burnett, the future lord protector of all things rootsy, does a great job of capturing all the nuance while keeping the sharp edges from getting worn off.
While they’ve never entirely grown out of shuffling, shambling stream of consciousness tracks (see the second side of their most recent), Rain King and Sullivan Street are proof of what the band would prove in the future: that they were really only a solid backbeat away from being pop rock superstars.
