Counting Crows Album Recommendations: "Recovering the Satellites"

Album Reviews

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Counting Crows

[#] Recovering the Satellites (1996)

Bands, please reign your singers in occasionally.

Reviewed September 21, 2026

This album might have the widest gap between the stuff I love about it and the bits that leave me the coldest. Recovering the Satellites is the "Mr. Jones" guys trying to make something dark, arty, and personally painful, full of dark guitars, endless codas, and tales of alienation over celebrity status moaned and cried the whole way through by Adam Duritz. Listen, I love This Desert Life, I'm used to Adam's mannerisms, but what the fuck is that awful "rain rain go away" coda on "I'm Not Sleeping", or indeed, "I'm Not Sleeping" as a whole? Why does "Miller's Angels", already 6:33 and going nowhere fast, end with, I swear to fuck, "Leave, leave, leave, leave me ALONE" punctuated by matching piano stabs? It beggars belief that anyone could take some of this shit seriously.

If you can skip over the most maudlin and unnecessarily sordid bits, the gems are quite shiny. I've long loved the one-two punch of openers "Catapult" and "Angels of the Silences", perfectly setting the heavier tone of Satellites with really solid songcraft and Adam's evocative, articulate lyrics. "A Long December", of course, is as heart-wrenchingly beautiful as it ever was. The band is in top form across the whole thing, and it makes tracks like "Have You Seen Me Lately?" and the hoarsely twangy "Mercury" more affecting for the music than the words. I really thought I didn't like this album until I subtracted out a couple of its most atonally whined, overly long songs and wound up with a wonderfully cathartic 41-minute folk rock album. Unfortunately, I'm not rating my playlist.

Essential:	"Catapult", "Angels of the Silences", "A Long December"
Quintessential:	"Children in Bloom"
Non-Essential:	"Miller's Angels"
Rating: