Name	Counting Crows
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Naionality	USA
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August and Everything After instantly established erstwhile coffeehouse folkie Adam Duritz and his San Francisco-based band as the latest heirs to the Van Morrison/Bob Dylan/Bruce Springsteen songwrit-ing tradition; Duritz even subbed for Morrison when the Irish soul troubadour failed to show for his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. The ambitions are spelled out in the breakthrough single "Mr. Jones," which mimics Morrison's "sha-la-la" and name-checks Dylan. The Crows bridge the worlds of rock, folk, and soul with an emphasis on living-room intimacy, thanks to T Bone Burnett's transparent production. The tunes are direct, melodic, uncluttered. The same can't be said for Duritz, whose wordy introspection is marred by a voice that whines as much as it wails.

These flaws are exacerbated on Recovering the Satellites, a more ambitious album with stabs at string orchestration and Memphis soul. The color gray, phones that don't ring, "the smell of hospitals in winter" -- Duritz sounds as self-obsessed as Morrissey, without the humor. He sings about the malaise of being a rock star in a voice that wanders the oc-taves in perpetual discomfort, even as the band compensates with its hardest rocker yet, "Angels of Silences," and the buoyant Eagles-like twang of "Daylight Fading."

The self-indulgence becomes insufferable on Across a Wire, a premature live double CD. "Angels of Silences" is reconfigured as an inspired jug-band blues, but Duritz sounds even mopier than usual. How ironic that while many of his songs struggle with life as a pop icon, the album prominently displays the MTV and VH1 logos and contains laudatory liner notes written by a VH1 executive.

Duritz snaps out of it on the best portions of This Desert Life, which comes out bustling with his gotta-get-out-of-town answer to "Born to Run" ("Hangin' Around") and follows it with "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby," which just keeps on rollicking through verse after verse with barely a pause, the guitars knifing through for air. Duritz loosens up just enough to join the rest of the Crows in the joy of the moment, rather than marching them down to the whipping post. For the self-proclaimed "king of the rain," the sky is beginning to clear ("I'm doing alright these days," he declares on "I Wish I Was a Girl") and the melancholy tunes mostly soar instead of wallow.
Hard Candy gives listeners a lot more to sing along with, even, as on "Black and Blue," when the singer imagines writing a suicide note. Rather than framing the singer's pain as on previous albums, the Crows' music counterbalances it. The abundant melodies are more instantly apparent, buffed into concise packages that take the Crows outside of their roots-rock cradle and into a more overtly pop realm, where sonic continuity matters less than the unique character of each song: dreamy piano balladry on "Butterfly in Reverse," new-wave keyboards for "New Frontier," Drifters-meet-Springsteen orchestrations on "Miami," the Mamas and Papas vocal vibe that pervades "Why Should You Come When I Call?" It's the most consistently tuneful of all the Crows albums, and it makes Duritz's moping almost tolerable.