Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!

“It’s about broken lives becoming something better,” Counting Crows founder Adam Duritz has said of “Spaceman in Tulsa,” the seesaw between despair and aspiration that arrives early on his band’s first album in a decade, *Butter Miracle, the Complete Sweets!*. Duritz has undergone a personal transformation of his own during the interim. Not only did he lop off his trademark dreadlocks, but several years into his fifties, he also started the longest romantic relationship of his life. He’s managing lifelong mental illness perhaps better than he ever has too. And so, *Butter Miracle* radiates urgency and vibrancy, as if Duritz has returned to his mid-’90s prime with the wisdom of a renewed perspective. Duritz composed *Butter Miracle* during separate stints on a friend’s remote farm in the English countryside. After flirting with long-form composition on 2014’s “Palisades Park,” he submitted to that ambition by building four interconnected pieces that feel like a summary of the band’s enduring strengths. Where the heroic climax of “The Tall Grass” summons the power and yearning of 1996’s *Recovering the Satellites*, “Bobby and the Rat-Kings” has the summertime essence of 2002’s *Hard Candy*. These are, like the best Crows songs, statements of possibility and belief, of peering out of darkness. The band originally released that material in 2021 as an EP but remixed it to match Duritz’s next batch, which includes his most direct and winning songs in decades. Opener “With Love, from A-Z” is an intellectually sprawling celebration of his new romance, while the moody piano epic “Virginia Through the Rain” documents the soft sting of lingering regret, even as broken lives indeed become something better. “We are evolving/In night to morning,” Duritz opines during “Under the Aurora,” the sort of emotional epic that’s forever been this band’s calling card. “And I want to believe in something/Spun out of darkness/Somewhere under the aurora.”