Recovering Musical Integrity

                At a time when when insightful, intelligent music seems to be the exclusive domain of female artists, Counting Crows stands as a major exception.             Like a dreadlocked, twenty-something Jacques Brel, lead singe/songwriter, Adam Duritz, plaintively bemoans the human condition in songs that go beyond mere entertainment, delivering poetic lyrics with a painful catch in his voice that lends just the right note of sincerity.             The motley assortment of alienated losers that inhabit Counting Crows songs are never reduced to maudlin stereotypes because like Tom Waits, Duritz somehow manages to construct real characters and situations within the small space of a song. We recognize ourselves or people we know in these songs and empathize. Like Waits too, Duritz neither wallows in his characters' misery, nor passes judgement on them. He instead celebrates their uniquely human ability to hope in the face of hopelessness.             Probably the best example of this dichotomy of hope and despair is in the line from "A Long December," "The smell of hospitals in winter and the feeling that its all a lot of oysters with no pearls/When all at once you look across a crowded room to see the way that light attaches to a girl."             One of the best songs is "Another Horsedreamer's Blues". At first, the line, "Marjorie's dreaming of horses," seems to refer to one of those sweet young girls who love horses. On closer inspection, however, we find he's singing about a woman teetering between sanity and suicide whose sole connection to reality is betting on the ponies. What is really fascinating is the onomatopoeic quality of the instrumental solo in which a screaming organ builds toward a crescendo that never happens, mirroring the empty, claustrophobic life of the main character.             This quality extends to the music itself. Like Steely Dan, Counting Crows solos fit the tunes like gloves, and are not merely rock jams that could easily be interch