Ev·ery·day - encountered or used routinely or typically : ORDINARY
“I did it / Do you think I’ve gone too far?” With twelve songs written in nine days, where the longest song on it clocks in at 4:36? Yes, Dave. You have. And it shows.
“If a DMB song is usually going to take six minutes to get there, my challenge to them was ‘Let’s see if we can do it in half the time, and see if we can get as much music in there that’s meaningful.’” —Everyday producer Glen Ballard
What Joel Schumacher was to the Batman series, Glen Ballard is to the Dave Matthews Band. Everyday lacks the soul, the energy, the groove that DMB has been known for up until now. Once a jazz-rock group, they are now a rock-pop group. Homogenous, yet vaguely familiar, the tracks on Everyday remind me that it's still the same group of five playing, yet somehow it's not. Perhaps it's because LeRoi has been relegated to a few cheesy-sounding 80s-era sax wails and that Boyd has been reduced to a few synth-sounding fiddle pieces.
Many of their previous songs were palimpsests—intricate layers of detailed melody and intelligent, provocative lyrics presented in a coherent and cohesive manner. In turn, the songs on Everyday are more like Xerox paper—copies of the rest of the stock in the popular music market. They all come across as very two-dimensional, full of unrealized potential and room for development. I listen time and time again, searching for the depth, the wisdom, in the songs and find nothing.
Good songs need time to mature, to develop. But pop music isn't about maturity, if that in fact is what they've chosen to become. Unlike before, where they would pick from their trove of unreleased songs (read: aged, road-tested songs), the songs on Everyday are brand new, written last summer in nine days, over a new song a day.
As an example, at the Austin City Limits performance, Dave (solo) was telling how he had played “Bartender” for Mac Davis, saying he “thought [he]'d finished”. After he played the song for him, Mac replied saying “That's good. I look forward to hearing it when it's finished.”
Dave says in his Rolling Stone interview that Everyday “saved [his] life”, pulling him out of a depressive state dwelling on death. If that’s the case, all the better. But his work is no better now that the pendulum has swung to the opposite end of quickly thrown out pop songs, and does nothing for the band as a whole and their artistic integrity. Dave needs to get off the Gleemonex. Not that I wish him any ill, but it’s well known that wholly happy and content artists make for bad art.
Change for the band is good, it keeps them from going stale and becoming stagnant. But I refuse to classify pop music as any sort of progress for the band; it’s a de-evolution for them. Pop music the realm of manufactured boy bands and synthetically-endowed teenage performers marketing to middle and young high school-aged kids. This is a group of guys who write their own music, played the college circuit, touring relentlessly for years, and who have earned where they are today.
I'm clinging to a hope that there's some salvation in how they carry these songs live, but the SNL performance wasn’t all that encouraging. DMB is/was a jam band. We’ll see if they still are April 21st if they play these same four-minute songs note-for-note or not. Learn from Batman, you five. Stay with your Tim Burton. Your Joel Schumacher will make you bright and gaudy, and will put nipples on your costumes.
The bottom line: Decent pop album, under-par shite for DMB. Come on guys, you can do better than this. C-
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