(Most really great improvisational music takes place within certain constraints-- when Miles Davis or John Coltrane were making it up as they went, the drummer wasn't. Somebody in the band needs to bear the responsibility for keeping time, and keeping everybody else in the same ballpark. The completely free-form thing produces occasional moments of brilliance, but only for those brief instants when the whole band happens to wander into the same time signature, or integer multiples thereof. So you get snippets of song emerging from a long mass of material that sounds like the output of five different people in neighboring apartments playing one part of a song they're listening to on headphones. Hence the correlation between the ingestion of massive quantities of drugs and hard-core Dead fandom...

(I haven't been subjected to as many live Dave Matthews tracks as I have Dead bootlegs, but for the most part, Matthews and his band seem to realize this. When they "jam," the rhythm section mostly plays it straight, or failing that, Matthews keeps time himself (he plays more like a rhythm guitarist anyway). The results are a lot better than the Grateful Dead "jams" I've heard (and the "Kit Kat Jam" on this record is a decent enough tune)-- Matthews runs afoul of a couple of other Grateful Dead Rules ("Songs reaching for Cosmic Significance tend to suck" and "Jam bands don't ROCK"), but this aside is nearly the length of the rest of the review, so I'll shut up now...)

All in all, this is a much better effort than their previous album, and probably better than Before These Crowded Streets as well. The only flaw is that, as noted above, the individual songs don't really jump out at you as songs in their own right. But then, I'm not sure that's really what I'm looking for from the Dave Matthews Band-- realistically, this album is pretty much exactly what I'm looking for from them. If you already like the band, well, you don't need me to tell you to buy this. If you didn't like them before, you won't like them now, so save your money.

(Looking at the fine print in a BlogCritics email, I see that I'm contractually obligated as a wannabe reviewer to note that this album grew out of the famous "Lillywhite Sessions" demos that were circulated on the Internet for a couple of years. As I've never heard those versions of the songs, I can't say anything useful about the comparison, but there's your obligatory review factoid...)