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Crash
04/30/1998 3:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Chuck Eddy
Dave Matthews Band play the kind of music fratboys study for finals to, not the kind fratboys dance to. Sometimes it's just '70s progressive rock: "Drive In Drive Out" here orchestrates like ELP; "Cry Freedom" is early Genesis singing in church. "Too Much" is more like Talking Heads art-funk, with the singer's mouth popping like the bass. But their horn charts always seem awkwardly added as out-of-it proof of good taste, so these chop-happy biracial Virginians' bluegrass-fiddle breakdowns outfunk their funk. "Lie In Our Graves" has offbeat pizzicato time signatures worthy of Led Zeppelin, and "Two Step" opens with a locomotive's worth of mechanical rhythm. Even the smarmy sleepwalk "Crash Into Me" is strummed with a forward motion that Dave's fellow stodges in Counting Crows only pulled off in "Mr. Jones." Problem is, the songs all dissolve into airy weightlessness as soon as Dave opens his zero-personality, blues-minstrel mushmouth. His tongue-twisting/proverb-cut-and-splicing lyrical shtick is corniness passing as cleverness: "Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we'll die," "I eat too much, I drink too much, I want too much," "I'm the king of the castle, you're the dirty rascal." Still, my wife thinks the dorks' tasty jazz jamming is beautiful, and I know a woman named Elizabeth who loved how Dave furrowed his eyebrows in last year's "What Would You Say" video. So maybe I'm just nitpicking.
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