Sam Taylor CD of the week
Despite the grim utilitarianism of their name, the Dave Matthews Band are a very strange phenomenon. They are vastly successful – their first two albums, 1994’s Under the Table and Dreaming and 1996’s Crash, sold a combined total of 11- million copies in the United States; Before These Crowded Streets (BMG), their third, went straight to number one there, mercifully knocking the Titanic soundtrack out of the top slot. Yet there is not a single succinct pop song in this CD’s 70 luxuriant minutes.
The Dave Matthews Band might best be described as “progressive rock” (virtuosic musicianship, time-signature changes, overbearingly male vibe), yet they are more jazz-folk than rock. The only guitar in the mix is acoustic and that is often overpowered by violin, banjo and various kinds of saxophone.
South African-born Dave Matthews has a decent white soul voice, yet spends half this album (a deliberately darker brew than its two Hootie and the Blowfish-like predecessors) gibbering like an ape in heat.
They are impeccably multiracial (the guys – three black and two white – met in Charlottesville, Virginia), yet their fanbase was forged in the all-white fraternities of the South’s poorer colleges. (The last – and only – time I went to a Southern frat party, the soundtrack consisted entirely of Huey Lewis and the News, which makes me wonder when the US’s muscle-headed “jock” community suddenly got into progressive jazz fusion.)
The tone of this album is very 1998 – which is to say, 1975 with better production values. The ghosts of all sorts of awful hippies (Barclay James Harvest, Genesis, Jethro Tull) haunt its grooves, yet so do sharp-suited funkateers like Steely Dan (albeit minus the wit). You never know quite where it’s coming from.
For all its emotional turbulence and myriad contradictions, however, Before These Crowded Streets has a familiarly American muso feel – you are never more than three growled verses about the slaughter of the Mohicans away from an accomplished clarinet solo. This is, essentially, high-quality barroom jazz recorded on a Nasa budget.