Dave Matthews Band's latest work sends the copycats scurrying
Now here's a nightmare modern-rock sequence: Marcy Playground's "Sex and Candy" followed by Sister Hazel's "All for You," Agents of Good Roots' "Come On" and "Don't Drink the Water," by the Dave Matthews Band.
Even the sadistic music director who programs these album cuts back-to-back might have trouble discerning one artist from the other. All rely on easygoing, prowling rhythms and unconventional instrumentation. All are shaped by laconic, sleepy-voiced singers. All attempt variations on that greasy, quasi-funk groove.
The record industry is an endless cycle of innovation followed by imitation, and in the last year, the Dave Matthews Band has become an apparently irresistible template. On its last two studio releases -- Under the Table & Dreaming (1994) and Crash (1996) -- the Charlottesville, Va., five-piece created a blend of '70s jazz fusion and sensitive-guy lyrics that attracted fans of musically sophisticated adult artists such as Sting as well as those who follow neo-hippie bands like Phish. Now every other new band has a baby-Dave vibe: Agents of Good Roots, from Richmond, Va., strives for the Matthews band's improvisatory looseness, and Sister Hazel, out of Gainesville, Fla., has adopted the band's saturation-touring career strategy. Moe, Widespread Panic, the list goes on.
It's easy to understand why the Dave Matthews Band, with its chattering violin leads and growling saxophone solos, is an attractive role model. In less than four years, it grew from bar-circuit crowd-pleaser into an arena headliner, one of the few superstar acts to surface in the one-hit-and-out '90s. Crash has sold over four million copies. Tickets for the group's current tour are moving at mind-boggling speed: Nearly 54,000 tickets to a June 7 show at Giants Stadium were sold in 90 minutes. That's right: This summer, the Dave Matthews Band will perform in stadiums. (It's uncertain where the band will play when it stops here, probably in July or August.)
As it launches Before These Crowded Streets (RCA four star rated) , the band finds itself in an interesting predicament: What happens when the field you plowed and seeded becomes overgrown with imitators? Is it possible to separate yourself from those who have replicated your mannerisms and thoroughly ravaged your playbook?
"The Last Stop," one of several extended fantasias on the new album, suggests that the DMB has made a conscious decision to vex its imitators. It begins with a snake-charmer riff you might hear in an open-air Balkan market, and when the 31-year-old Matthews enters, he sounds like he's studied the serpentine phrasing of the Sufi devotional singing known as qawwali. He's not reserved for long: He uses his raw voice to sound bitter, then seized with physical pain, then consumed with a rage he's never before displayed.
The band supports him through this tumult with subtle dissonances and jarring syncopations. By the time they join forces to pursue a climax, the melody is long obliterated, replaced by a shrieking hailstorm of dischord, the kind of musical violence usually associated with catharsis-obsessed acts such as Nine Inch Nails. Just as "The Last Stop" threatens to cross the threshold of pain, the weather changes. The piece ends in consonance with an idly plucked banjo that conjures a tranquil river scene.
Not all of Before These Crowded Streets -- which, like Crash, was produced by Steve Lilliwhite -- pushes for such extremes. Several tracks, including "Stay (Wasting Time)," are mindless boilerplate singles. But even at its shallowest, the album has a fierce vitality missing from the shambling, shoe-gazing, half-apologetic prattle of the Grateful Dead-inspired jam bands. It's music that is proudly full of life, not just the practice room. Music that doesn't apologize for being sexy -- Matthews does a hot-and-bothered moan better than just about any man alive -- or being brainy. Music that succeeds because it insists on addressing head and hips at the same time.
The DMB sound-alikes aspire to those same values, but rarely manifest them, much less offer evidence of an original thought. Apart from the slurpy 4/4 timekeeping, the vague blue notes and other easy-to-cop Matthewsian trademarks, there's not much to distinguish them. Agents of Good Roots trades in numbingly ordinary, undisciplined noodling. Marcy Playground's "Sex and Candy" might have been cobbled from sections of previous DMB singles.
It's not surprising that Matthews and his cohorts sought to distance themselves from the pack with Before These Crowded Streets. Far darker and more complex than anything in the band's catalog, it's a "copy this" taunt to less-accomplished followers and a challenge to fans of the Happy Dave. It's more snarly than cuddly, more math than language arts. In deftly negotiated meter changes ("Rapunzel," among others) and ethereal orchestrations ("The Dreaming Tree") is embedded a lesson: Anyone can replicate sounds; the trick is in personalizing them, making them signify something.
Indeed, Before These Crowded Streets uses wacka-wacka guitars that recall U2's The Joshua Tree, and summons the pagentry associated with Peter Gabriel. But these devices are never simply borrowed. They're braided into sprawling, intricately woven tapestries.
It's this ability to transform the ordinary that makes the Dave Matthews Band consistently interesting. Lots of rhythm sections play two-chord funk vamps; few approach them with the gnawing, investigative propulsion of DMB drummer Carter Beauford and bassist Stefan Lessard. Similarly, when Matthews sings of love, he doesn't play the victim or the stereotypical predator; instead, he fantasizes about peeking under the hem of a skirt. On "Rapunzel" and several other new songs, he expresses desire with a soul-singer's neediness, blunt but never offensive. He shows an interest in worldly concerns, too: "Don't Drink the Water" is a rant about the Ugly American takeover of a tropical paradise, while "The Dreaming Tree" laments the psychological impact of progress. ("Below it he would sit for hours at a time," Matthews sings. "Now progress takes away what forever took to find.")
There are several interesting guests on Before. The Kronos Quartet enriches "Halloween" and "The Stone," Bela Fleck provides atmospheric banjo on "The Last Stop" and "Spoon," and Alanis Morissette -- who has been imitated a few times herself -- turns in a transfixing cameo on "Spoon." The band uses Morissette well: Her entrance plays like a dispatch from another planet, and her urgency contrasts powerfully with Matthews' amiable, studiously relaxed phrasing.
Morissette and others plagued by the dubious flattery of imitation will find much encouragement in Before These Crowded Streets. By going deeper, and working the fringes rather than the center, the Dave Matthews Band suggests that in an age when replication is rewarded, it is still possible -- sometimes even noble -- to be original.
© Tom Moon 1998
Album Review-¨All The Pain Money Can Buy¨ by Fastball
If this were 1978, Fastball would probably be climbing charts and
conquering arenas. Coming on as breezy and crafty as early Cheap Trick, the
Texas rock trio plays a straightforward, unself-conscious form of rock-pop
that's sharp, crafty and immediately catchy. Highly derivative, too -- and in
1998, where a great pop record has to Mean Something, that's critical
suicide. In a musical era that's too smart for what Fastball does, all they
have going for them is an "industry buzz" and an opening slot on the
Everclear tour. None of which stops "All the Pain Money Can Buy," the
band's second album, from being a simple and guilty pleasure; if it sounds
like a throwback, it's worth noting that sounding like a throwback in this
day and age can be an act of bravery.
The name alone speaks volumes; Fastball -- no curves, no change-ups.
Guitarist Miles Zuniga and bassist Tony Scalzo split the songwriting
evenly, and both are acolytes of the Church of the Killer Hook,
off-handedly whipping up gems like the driving "Sooner or Later," the
angst-free and upbeat "Better Than It Was" and the kiss-off "Slow Drag,"
which closes up its light and lazy blues-pop with some telling "Revolver"-esque soundboard tweaking. Drummer Joey Shuffield has an open, playful style that keeps the moodiest tunes ("Charlie, the Methadone Man") from completely drowning in misery, and both Zuniga and Scalzo have strong, evocative voices; indeed, Zuniga sings in a way that suggests that he
could answer any number of obscure discographical questions about Matthew
Sweet. Perspective here is crucial, though. What Fastball is at heart is just an above-average bar band, and the skills they display on "All the
Pain" are fairly limited ones; when they get too crafty, like on the busy, Latin-styled single "The Way," the soufflé collapses miserably. But Cheap Trick was a bar band once too, and purely in terms of raw enthusiasm, it's fun, disposable pop.
And don't think their record label doesn't know it; Fastball's precisely
the sort of band that gets a few hits squeezed out of them, then thrown
away like an old sponge (two rock star-fantasy tunes, "Which Way to the
Top?" and "Warm Fuzzy Feeling," suggest they might be paying too much
attention to their A & R rep). But when the horns kick in on "G.O.D. (Good
Old Days)," strong and proud and thoroughly familiar, it's a thrill that's
hard to resist. And when Zuniga proclaims on "Fire Escape" that "I can be
myself, how 'bout you?" it's obvious that he loves his music more and
refuses to apologize for it more than the latest hip techno-blues-folk-afropop atrocity. Pray that the record recoups. After all, "Fastball: Live at Budokan" has a nice ring to it.
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