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For hardcore Counting Crows fans, the California roots-pop band’s live shows have often been more revelatory than their albums, affording frontman Adam Duritz the opportunity to stretch his time-tested Van Morrison impression out to inhumane lengths. For the rest of us, the group’s studio albums — actually, the singles from the studio albums — have offered just the right amount of Duritz’s soulful-vagabond shtick: if I’d heard only “A Long December,” the spine-tingling smash from 1996’s Recovering the Satellites, I might be a hardcore Counting Crows fan myself. New Amsterdam, their second live disc, does not include “A Long December,” a decision more boneheaded than Duritz’s supremely iffy dreadlocks. In its place the album does offer 15 other selections from the band’s expansive catalogue, all presented in namby-pamby coffeeshop-folk arrangements that make each one indistinguishable from the others. Before “St. Robinson in His Cadillac Dream,” Duritz asks his adoring audience, “Are you ready to funk-rock?” If so, they were disappointed.
COUNTING CROWS + GOO GOO DOLLS | Tweeter Center, Mansfield | July 29 | 617.931.2000
