Counting Crows’ “Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings” is just your average brilliant, unsparing rock & roll song cycle about the high life and the low life, about sin and whatever follows. This is a dark ride. “Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings” is less Animal House and more Requiem For A Dream. So if “Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings” is the last album that Counting Crows (or for that matter anybody else) ever release, at least the band will be going out with one hell of a big bang.
This is an album with two distinct yet deeply related halves that will not only remind long-time admirers of what makes Counting Crows a great band in the first place – it reminded the band as well. “Saturday Nights”, the album’s angry, electric, dissolute opening salvo, was produced by Gil Norton (The Pixies, Foo Fighters), a long-time friend and associate of the band who previously produced the band’s second album “Recovering The Satellites”. The more acoustic and folk-influenced “Sunday Mornings” was produced by Brian Deck whose past credits include Modest Mouse and Iron & Wine.