The Black Crowes

Often, an artist’s answer to ennui is to risk commercial viability by striving to break new, often uncomfortable ground.

For fans, this can be painful to watch, and for Black Crowes fans, it’s downright hard to handle. In the roughshod 18-year career of this Southern-soul band, the bro-centric Crowes have soared (sparking an unexpected early-’90s R&B and blues revival) but also blown the bong smoke of amateur, red-eyed poetry and schizo, love-the-world-hate-yourself meltdowns right back in our faces.

Judging by the group’s latest, the back-to-basics Warpaint, this Crowes tour will contain more sexy pouting and boozy, rock-god revelry than the pretentious I-found-the-answers-to-life-high-on-the-tour-bus antics that have hindered this combo’s recent years.

Rock on? Maybe. Party on? Hell, yeah.

”She Talks to Angels” by the Black Crowes