Resounding relevance, versatility in ‘dad rock’
FOR Dave Matthews, “dad rock” isn’t a put-down. Come Tomorrow, the ninth studio album by the Dave Matthews Band and its first since 2012, earnestly embraces fatherhood, commitment, lifelong romance and hope for the next generation.
The album starts with a song welcoming a new child, Samurai Cop (Oh Joy Begin), carried by pealing guitars that echo the reverent gravity of U2. (Like U2, the band is including a copy of the new album with concert tickets, a strategy that will boost its chart rankings.)
And the album ends with When I’m Weary, an orchestral hymn that acknowledges “dark dark days” but vows: “You remind me to keep on trying”. A gloomy streak runs through Matthews’s back-catalogue, yet willed optimism fills the songs on Come Tomorrow.
It’s an album of love songs: progressing through childhood crushes, adult lust, parental nurturing and benedictions for unknown descendants. The title song, a crisp march reinforced by a string section, starts with an old man bemoaning the state of the world even as a “little kid” starts figuring out how to save it.
The music provides convolutions. Folk-pop, funk, metal, jazz, maths-rock and pop from South Africa (where Matthews was born) all show up in the 14 tracks on Come Tomorrow. The band can converge on a riff or fan out in intricate counterpoint, and its agility makes odd, shifting meters and Matthews’s leaping vocal lines – baritone below, uncharted above – sound natural.
The interplay of the core band – particularly Matthews’s acoustic guitar picking, Stefan Lessard’s springy bass lines and Carter Beauford’s pinpoint drumming – easily opens out to arena scale as electric guitars chime in and string and horn arrangements swell.
A six-year gap between studio albums hasn’t tempted the Dave Matthews Band to try to update (or obviously computerise) its sound. The instruments are still handplayed, and the grooves still sound like they were created through jamming, not programming.
That Girl Is You unfolds from introduction to obsession over a four-chord syncopated guitar riff, with Matthews playing nearly every part in the studio, yet there’s an improvisational volatility to his voice – breathy and cagey, then rounded and courteous, then agitated and scratchy, then shrieking in wild-eyed falsetto.
The album was recorded gradually, in multiple studios with multiple producers. Two songs that have long been evolving in the band’s live sets, Can’t Stop and Idea of
You, include alto saxophone from Leroi Moore, a founding band member who died in 2008. Idea of You – a jammy song about a childhood crush lingering to become an adult romance – is also the only track on the album with violinist Boyd Tinsley, who left the band in February after two decades, citing health reasons; he later faced allegations of sexual harassment, which he denied.
One of Matthews’s strengths has been his lyrics’ passionate respect for women; it’s a major reason his concert audiences are far more gender-mixed than most jam-band crowds. The women in his songs are compelling, beautiful, mystical and carnal all at once.
Do You Remember? echoes Shangaan pop from South Africa – thumb-popping bass, hopping vocal lines, stuttering guitars and horns – while the lyrics sketch a romance that began young, with children’s games, and grew up to “making love on the back seat”.
The realisation that life is cyclical is a long view, a fatherly view. Matthews has decided he’s not going to be the grumpy old man he sings about in Come Tomorrow, but he doesn’t sugarcoat things either. – New York Times