Dave Matthews Band
Live at Folsom Field Boulder, Colorado
RCA Records
Let’s start off by setting things straight about the
popular Dave Matthews: He is a semi-talented songwriter and a
competent performer but his personality is just annoying as hell.
That pseudo-stoned 35-year-old frat boy bullshit — well,
it’s just plain stupid.
But more than even Dave himself, its DMB fans that are
irritating. Tight-clothed females ages sixteen to twenty-two and
their baseball-cap-donning boyfriends are the only people who can
possibly find Dave’s shtick endearing or humorous. If those
fans aren’t nauseating enough, Dave also attracts plenty of
young wannabe hippies (the ones who wear patchwork clothes but
still shower regularly) and Christian teens who wanna rock but not
so hard as to upset their parents.
All that said, let’s get down to Dave’s latest
release. Live at Folsom Field — recorded at the home
of the University of Colorado Buffalo’s football squad
— includes twenty-one tracks spread over two-and-a-half hours
for an average of seven minutes per song!
Needless to say, the band can’t keep its shit interesting
for 150 minutes. One can only take so much acoustic
guitar-violin-saxophone-whatever jamming before boredom sets in and
you have to start playing Nintendo.
DMB include plenty of the, uh, “classics” in their
set like “Crash Into Me,” “Recently,”
“Two Step” and “Ants Marching,” but none of
’em are any good. There’s also some newer stuff
including “Bartender,” “Everyday” and
“Digging a Ditch.” None of those are any good
either.
When you get down to it, I guess what I’m trying to say is
that this record just isn’t any good. Dave’s songs are
all middle-of-the-road pop-rock shit, and the jams are
mind-numbingly long. Now that I think about it, maybe I do hate
Dave Matthews completely. 1 out of 5 stars
– Joel Hoard
—Nov. 19, 2002