Discord progressions

The Black Crowes resurface

by Matt Ashare

Three songs into the somewhat eagerly awaited new Black Crowes album, singer Chris Robinson wails urgently and urgingly, "Come on, come on, let's get this thing started," as if even he were well aware that Lions (V2, May 8) was off to a rather sluggish start. It has been a good three years since the Crowes, then signed to Columbia as a holdover from their deal with Rick Ruben's American Recordings venture, delivered their last full-length studio recording. But it's not as if they'd been sitting around letting their chops get rusty: the band spent a good chunk of last year touring with Jimmy Page, digging hard and deep into the Led Zeppelin songbook. They even got a pretty good live album out of the deal: Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes, Live at the Greek. And you gotta figure that having aired all their brother-on-brother dirty laundry, not to mention some less than charitable feelings about Ruben, in a VH1 "Behind the Music" installment, Chris and guitarist Rich Robinson would feel they have something to prove on their first disc for Richard Branson's V2 label. But rather than getting right down the business of delivering anything even remotely resembling a radio single, the now NYC-based band spend the first two chances they get on Lions working what sounds like half a Zeppelin riff out of their system for a little over four unfocused minutes ("Midnight from the Inside Out"), and then they do their best to build a song ("Lickin' ") around some parlor trick Rich has perfected using what might be the toggle switch on his guitar to create a staccato effect that's almost cool enough to go into greater detail about but not quite.

It all does finally come together for the blooze brothers on "Come On," a nasty slab of soul-charged retro-rock that gets into the "Remedy" groove that's always worked so well for the Crowes. But "Come On" is the exception to the free-spirited unruliness that dominates Lions. It's not that this a bad album, really. In fact, in some ways the raw, jammy, seat-of-our-leather-pants feel of Lions is a triumph over the forces that be who'd rather have half a dozen song-doctored banalities from a band capable of sounding as much like Aerosmith as the Crowes do when Chris gets going with some Tylerized rag-doll scatting on "Ozone Mama." And any band who can overcome the sanitizing tendencies of A-list producer Don Was -- a guy who generally gets brought in when it's time to ruin a Rolling Stones album -- can't be all bad. Actually, given Jimmy Page's dismal record without Robert Plant (the Firm? Coverdale/Page?), the Crowes deserve at least one free pass for keeping him on track in 2000.

But at the risk of getting a little too far behind the music, I'd have to say that Lions sounds like the kind of disc two brothers who don't get along all that well would write together. It's full of cool little riffs and melodies that'll remind you of dozens of other cool little riffs and melodies from the late-'60s/early-'70s rock canon by everyone from Zep and Aerosmith to the Stones and Faces -- all perfectly respectable sources. ("No Use Lying" opens with a little wah-wah flourish that could have been sampled from "Dazed and Confused.") But rarely does any of it coalesce into more than the sum of its borrowed parts. I just don't get the sense that anyone took the time to sit down and work through the arrangements, and even the lyrics ("Got my soul singing" is the catch phrase in, uh, "Soul Singing," and in the chorus of "No Use Lying" Chris wheels out a particularly tired bluesism -- "Don't want you hanging round my back door") are mostly patchwork of bits and pieces of verse you know you've heard before.

That said, the Black Crowes have probably done themselves a favor by partnering up with Oasis, their retro-rocking equals from across the Atlantic, this summer on the amusingly named "Tour of Brotherly Love." (It comes to the Tweeter Center with yet another brother band, Spacehog, opening on June 11.) Brotherly discord has been getting good press since the earliest days of rock, when Cain used one to nail Abel. And both the Crowes and Oasis have had plenty of fun playing up their own sibling rivalries. Teaming up, and adding Spacehog to the bill, gives the press a hook that will be hard to resist in a summer filled mostly with the usual bland shed fare and a couple of Ozzfests. The real rivalry, though, will almost surely be between the headliners, because each possesses what the other lacks: Oasis have tons of songs and very little soul; Black Crowes have lots of soul and, as Lions seems to indicate, not much in the way of songs. Then, of course, there's Spacehog, who appear to be lacking in both departments. It's sure to make for some great Behind the Music recollections one of these day.