In between those tributes lies what we've come to expect from a Dave Matthews Band disc: a safe bet on reliable product. Like most of its predecessors, the group's first album in four years is a perfectly competent and professionally executed, if occasionally soporific, entry to the band's familiar catalog.
As usual, we get mildly funky party jams (the brass-buoyed "Shake Me Like a Monkey," whose opening recalls Cameo's "Word Up"); mid-tempo message songs ("Funny the Way It Is" finds Matthews musing generically about babies, soldiers, and the unjust state of the world); and cuddlesome ballads about couples plotting an escape to paradise after the kids have left home ("You and Me").
This time out, the band worked with longtime Green Day producer Rob Cavallo - and granted, Cavallo's resume includes helming sessions for polished popsters like Jewel and Alanis Morissette - but one wishes more of the grit, edge, or energy that's defined Cavallo's partnership with the dynamic Bay Area punk-pop trio had rubbed off here.
There are a few invigorating exceptions scattered about, however. "Seven" is a sinewy slice of sly, syncopated funk. And the countdown-to-combustion workout, "Time Bomb," finds Matthews melting down and singing hard (an energizing change from his typically enervated approach) as life and sanity unravel around him.
But too often the album is larded with adult-contemporary fare such as the string-saturated "My Baby Blue," and the numbingly new age-esque mood of "Lying in the Hands of God," accented with what sounds like flugelhorn (and are those wind chimes I hear?). Given the musically versatile, vaunted band behind it, "Big Whiskey," for all its stylistic reach and array of textures, is frequently beset with a curious bout of blandness.
