This is an Enhanced CD, which contains both regular audio tracks and multimedia computer files.
Counting Crows: David Immergluck (vocals, acoustic & electric guitars, slide guitar, electric sitar); Dave Vickrey (vocals, acoustic & electric guitars, banjo, sitar); Charles Gillingham (vocals, acoustic guitar, accordion, piano, Wurlitzer electric piano, Fender Rhodes electric piano, Omnichord, Hammond B-3 organ, chamberlain, Mellotron, synthesizer); Matt Malley (vocals, guitar, electric bass, double bass); Adam Duritz (vocals, harmonica, piano, tambourine, loo bells, samples); Jim Bogios (vocals, drums, percussion, loops); Steve Bowman (vocals, drums).
Additional personnel: Sheryl Crow (background vocals).
Producers include: David Bryson, T-Bone Burnett, Gil Norton, David Lowry, Dennis Herring.
U.K. version features the live bonus track "Blues Run The Game."
When Counting Crows emerged in the early 1990s with a folk-rock sound that seemed to hearken back to Van Morrison and Bob Dylan, they represented for many a welcome alternative to the dour, sludgy grunge nation that ruled the rock roost. With Adam Duritz's poetic sad-sack lyrics, Charlie Gillingham's Garth Hudson-like keyboard work, and a bedrock of jangling guitars, the Crows turned out a passel of fine albums in their first decade, each of which is well represented on this collection.
The hits are obviously here; the self-referential breakout smash "Mr. Jones," the out-of-left-field soundtrack contribution "Big Yellow Taxi" (which found the band riding Joni's chestnut all the way to the singles charts), and the pulsating, Sheryl Crow-assisted "American Girls." With a band as substantive as this, however, it's the lesser-known album tracks that are the real meat in the meal, and there are plenty here, as well as a couple of previously unreleased tracks. The new songs, a live version of the Grateful Dead ballad "Friend of the Devil" and a typically catchy original composition "She Don't Want Nobody Near," suggest that the story of Counting Crows is far from over.
What the critics say...
Uncut (2/04, pp.88-9) - 4 stars out of 5 - "[T]hey can reach peaks of sincere intensity."
