While Lions roars with all of the classic rock bombast and Stones-y swagger we've come to expect from the Crowes, the album is sorely lacking in the magic that can only be achieved when the innately talented drive themselves to distraction in the pursuit of perfection. There's precious little of the extravagant muso twiddling and indulgent nonsense that has waylaid the band sometimes in the past. When the Crowes stumble into the right place, they soar. Indeed, at its best, their sixth album delivers the same streamlined pleasures that the group rediscovered on 1999's By Your Side. With the exception of 1999's By Your Side, which showed flashes of the band's original brilliance, in recent years the songwriting of brothers Chris and Rich Robinson has deteriorated into a muddled mess of hard rock cliches.
Lions is the low point of that decline.
With Lions, the band has dropped its biggest dud, a moribund disaster with no more than a tiny handful of salvageable songs. Pumped full of funk-rawk formaldehyde to stop the choruses dropping off, it boasts all the originality of a cloned baked bean and about as many tunes as a tractor makes trying to get out of a ditch. Most critics of this CD sound like they've been living in a cave with N'sync or Brittany for 3 years. I love stuff like that. A complete musical experience.