Dave Matthews Band - Stand Up

[20to20K]

First let me say that I don't think DMB will ever make another great AOR album again. IMO they've abandoned their older (better) formula of 6 minute jam songs that gave the band room to show their individual soloing skills.
Their new formula appears to be 3 1/2 minute, better than average pop ditties that are trying to maintain musical integrity while also garnering
some radio airplay. Basically hiqh quality top-40 pop.

With that in mind I think Stand Up is a reasonably succesful piece of work.
The songs are catchy enough to be memorable, not mundane enough to be run of the mill, musical enough to display their obvious talent, and lyrically as provocative as always.

I'm more of a fan of the bands skills with their instruments than Daves songwriting or vocal ablity so it does not approach the standard they set in their earlier studio albums like Crash, and Under the Table...
While this CD is certainly no where near the quality of their first three studio releases...it is significantly better than their first attempt at top-40: "Everyday".

As always the case on DMB CD's the sound quality is excellent. It is available on 24bit Dual Disk as well as Redbook.

Overall I'll give it a B- for performance and A for sound.

[Troy]

DMB is so done.

I really like "Under the Table" and "Crash", but they never grew into anything from there.

They got too big, too popular for their own good. Their perceived "obligation" to their please their fans and play it safe artistically stifled the band.

OR

The band was incapable of moving on.

[ForeverAutumn]

I'm not a big fan of DMB, but my husband is. I tell ya, everytime they come to town we try to buy tickets. They'll sell out 20,000 tickets in under an hour. We've never managed to score a pair (which is okay by me).

Anyway, I've heard the new disk once. It didn't do anything for me. Even Hubby doesn't like it (he's given it more spins).

If you want to hear some real dreck, listen to Matthews solo disk. Now there's a waste of plastic.

[Resident Loser]

...zzzzzzz....zzzzzzz....snortle....zzzzzz...

With apologies to those who may hold a different opinion, what was the big deal to begin with?...admittedly, my only exposure to him was via tee-vee appearances, but come on...drone, drone, drone...like was it the same song EVERY time? Coulda' been...

To be fair, most music(that I have been exposed to) of late falls into a few categories...but it's all formulaic...one "innovator"(and I use that term with great reservation) and a hunnert carbon copies...cheeezz, they all seem to have the vocal range of about half an octave(if they're lucky) OR they can't hold a pure tone so they resort to that "oo-oo-oo-ah-ah-ah" sounds-like-they're-havin'-a-seizure warblin'...the Queen of the Night can pull it off, but these "divas" are anything but...and the songwriting just plain s*cks...anybody seen the bridge...and please don't give me the "think outside the box" cr@p...art it ain't...

jimHJJ(...perhaps next time I'll tell you how I really feel...)

[shokhead]

Never heard any reason to like DMB.