Hard Candy

Reviewed by:
David Peisner

Will the Counting Crows’ declining commercial fortunes ever spur them to take more chances in their music? It seems not. The Crows stay the folk-rock course on Hard Candy, delivering up 13 utterly likeable tunes that for the third straight time fail to build much on their emotionally throttling 1993 debut, August And Everything After. Most of the album works from the band’s two main reference points: ’70s classic rock and themselves. The jangly guitar refrain that opens the first song, “Hard Candy,” is vintage Tom Petty, though the tune’s self-consciously poetic imagery recalls nothing so much as mid-’90s Counting Crows; “If I Could Give All My Love (Richard Manuel Is Dead)” mentions the Band but sounds like the Eagles; a mandolin tiptoes through “Good Time,” only to be overrun by swaths of overamped electric guitar and cheesy synths that might’ve escaped from a Foreigner song. As always, romantic disappointment plays big in frontman Adam Duritz’s songs, but without the sense of world-beating struggle that informed the first record, he just sounds like another sad-eyed schmo.

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