reviewed in the New York Times. I gave it a "run-through" over the weekend. It is surprisingly good.
Weighing Public Problems and Personal Pleasures
Dave Matthew's Band's studio albums have a weird tendency to be "over-produced," i.e. their sound has been marinading in synthesizers and equalizers for too long. Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King suffers from that, although not as much as, say, Everyday.
Since I am an amateur guitar player, my perception of certain types of musical arrangements is sharpened. DMB's music has a quality that I would describe as "spaciness." For starters, a quintet rock band that features a violin player and a woodwind instrument player is quite rare. Because of the vastly different nature of the instruments that are played, there exists a lot of "space" between each instrument's sound. The highly-evolved human eardrum can sense this. Contrast DMB's arrangements with the very typical rock quintet that features a vocalist, lead guitarist, rhythm guitarist, bass player, and drummer. There just isn't a lot of "space" between the different instrumental parts. This is not to say that the Dave Matthews Band consistently achieves musical utopia and the average rock quintet does not.
Also, Dave Matthews's chord voicings are somewhat unique. Rather than play chords across 5 or 6 strings....he plays triads, such as a 1st, a 3rd, and a 5th... on 3 strings and does a lot of muting with his left hand. Again, this contributes to the spaciness mentioned above, for the sound is not quite as full as other voicings. This leaves a lot of room for other instruments to fill the space.
Whoever produces Dave Matthews Band's studio albums, at least the last few, has succeeded in eviscerating the "spaciness" factor of their sound. In other words, the gaps are being filled by synthesized vocal parts and layered instrumentals. Doesn't sound the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment