Counting Crows at The Civic

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

The Counting Crows had taken their own good time getting here.

It had been a decade since the Los Angeles band's multimillion-selling debut August and Everything After broke big and effectively started a wave of groups returning American rock fundamentals to the airwaves after the bombardment of the grunge years.

It appears that the wait (or the sliding slope of their sales graph) hasn't dented the enthusiasm of the group's local following.

Saturday night's Civic show was a sell-out, with a crowd which seemed to have a slight female skew.

They received exactly what they paid for, a thoroughly professional delivery, highlights from the band's four studio albums and a close-up encounter with the band's intriguing frontman-songwriter, Adam Duritz.

The chap can certainly sing and he's quite the showman, despite resembling - well, from the circle seats of this steeply-seated theatre anyway - a slightly paunchier version of The Simpsons' Sideshow Bob.

And if sniffy critics are going to point out his Van Morrison vocal tendencies, he's game enough to embrace them, swinging into Van the Man's Sweet Thing from the band's own early hit Round Here, which was played as the extended finale before the encore and made for a highlight.

The septet delivered their other early hit Mr Jones a few songs into the set and kept up the folk-rock energy on strident numbers like Hangingaround and the new American Girls.

They might have played solidly and it's not every day you see a rock guy adopting the traditional foot-on-the-monitor pose while playing a tiny mandolin.

But it was the ballads, often with Duritz at the piano, which had more character and passion.

Otherwise the rockier parts of the set showed that they are a band that could be accused of writing the same song twice (or more).

And while they're good players, it was hard to get too excited about what was at best a solid performance from a band who haven't strayed much from the blueprint of their early success.