Are Counting Crows Trying To Channel "Odelay" Era Beck?

1990's era music fans perk up. This tall cool one's for you. Counting Crows, that band of laid back bards who brought "Mr. Jones" into our memory banks is back in the thick of things with a September album "Somewhere Under Wonderland". Leading the charge from said set is "Scarecrow" which demonstrates the coffeehouse cuddle bunny days of "Mr. Jones" are clearly in the rear view mirror. The arrangements are vast. The harmonies remain fiddle string tight. Yup, vocalist Adam Duritz still lounges around on the mike like he was cooing sweet nothings into its ear. What grates on me is that the word volume plied on "Scarecrow" is so erudite that the people who make Tylenol are highly likely to want to send Adam thank you notes since he's tripling their sales. Migraine headache city that doesn't seem to have a cure. Anyone who bought Beck's "Odelay" CD probably remembers "Devil's Haircut". One part of the lyrical equation is basically Senor Hansen firing off nouns that don't appear to have much purpose other than to fill air. I refer to "Mouthwash, jukebox, gasoline". From Beck that's forgiven because that song was a stunningly cool retro trip to the decade of bell bottoms, afros, and white boys with stringy, greasy hair comprising arena level rock bands. Counting Crows doesn't belong in that quirky ballpark. Like "Devil's Haircut" "Scarecrow does succeed in confining its alien to plain English translation zone to one very specific place. For Counting Crows that would be the chorus. Adam sings "I am the scarecrow, snowman sideshow. Uh.....what's that? So what we're dealing with is a twitchy schizophrenic's uncontrolled inner turmoil. Thinking the policemen in your area don't get paid nearly enough? From Beck we get "Pistols pointing at a poor man's pockets" and "Hitching a ride with the bleeding noses". Not to be outdone the Crows stuff their lyric sheet with a super sized dollop of literary artsy fartsy references. If this was a meal I'd have enough leftovers to last for two weeks running. Who has that kind of free air space anymore? Everything from aliens to undercover Russians cruising around in a pink Rolls Royce to a woman married alive in a Moscow surgery. Don't laugh single ladies and gents. The nuptial set clearly gets why the rhyme has you snickering. I've heard of stream of consciousness writing. For some it's a potent way to show others the soul of a poet beats within. For me I think of little kids having snowball fights with each other. You dig me? I'm imagining those sequences where one group of kids is unrelentingly bombarding the other with snow bomb after snow bomb until the resulting chaos is unintentionally comical. Let the rugby scrum pile off so I can catch my breath please. There's way too much brainpower on display for me to feel anything other than inadequate. Counting Crows brought an entire arsenal. I possess merely a pop gun. There's nothing wrong with allowing the creative juice to wash freely over the page. The downside is it distracts from the commendable competency of the band's playing. Adam is biting off way more than he should be asked to chew. Meanwhile we can't draw a clear bead on Jim Bogios' quality drumming or the momentum supposedly promised us by David Bryson's Lynyrd Skynyrd reminiscent guitar licks. We end up far too busy hiding behind a rock shielding our puny brains from Adam's newest cultural bombardment. The moving parts should operate as a slick, well oiled unit. In this instance Adam is the lead sled dog and neither the mushers nor his fellow dogs can keep up with his overflowing train of thought. If you promptly got amnesia after one listen, consider yourselves fortunate. That's your brain's way of protecting you from more than any of us can reasonably handle. Too much salt on this entree, fellas. If I'm only aware of sodium how can I fully appreciate the rest of the meal? This is one scarecrow that could've benefited from staying reliably inert here and there. There's a happy medium between songs that beat the chorus to death and those that have an audience reeling from the awkwardly huge lyrical content base. Counting Crows fail to find that here and their artistry suffers for it.