ALBUM RECOMMENDATIONS |

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The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Matchbox Twenty

[#] Mad Season (2000)

Reviewed August 14, 2024

Grand instrumentation, grand emotions.

Something interesting happened in between Yourself or Someone Like You and its follow-up: Rob Thomas got famous. He partially wrote and honked his little ass off on a little song called "Smooth" by a little band called Santana, and while it was fucking Latin pop Velveeta of the highest magnitude, it sat atop Billboard's Hot 100 for three entire months, the very last number one of the 90s, and won three Grammys. Suddenly, all eyes were on Rob Thomas. The decision was quick and clear: Mad Season was to be much heavier on the pop, and only Rob's songs would feature. It's a bold strategy, Cotton, and whether you want more or find it gross will depend entirely on your taste for overly-earnest dorky Floridian dude pop rock.

Yourself was all guitars; Mad Season broadens the sonic palette considerably, with full horn sections ("Black and White People"), nocturnal, ever-90s adult contemporary gentle synth swishes like cool desert winds ("If You're Gone", "Leave"), and orchestral swells on jazzy wannabe-Bond themes ("You Won't Be Mine"). Matchbox Twenty don't fully leave the rock behind, but again, it all goes back to Rob. He's exploring new emotions in addition to angst--fear, hollowness, doubt in himself and his future wife--so the band has to explore new ways of expressing that. If you need a good layer of irony to be able to enjoy vulnerable pop music, Rob Thomas will not butter your muffin, now or ever. Matchbox Twenty really do have a knack for effective, realistic drama and catchy tunes, though, and Mad Season delivers in technicolor.

Essential:	Quintessential:	Non-Essential:	Rating:
"Mad Season", "The Burn", "Bent"	"If You're Gone"	"Bed of Lies"

[#] Yourself or Someone Like You (1995)

Reviewed January 6, 2024

They don't make 'em like this anymore--up to you what that means.

In the 70s, we got a handful of albums where every single song became a massive radio hit. In the 90s, we wound up with the next closest thing--Matchbox Twenty's Yourself or Someone Like You. Between "3 A.M.", "Push", "Real World", "Back 2 Good", "Girl Like That", and "Long Day", the entire first half of the record plays like a greatest hits. You can still walk into stores and hear these songs over the speaker set today. Divorce yourself from your feelings of a post-"Smooth" Rob Thomas, because when this album first dropped, no one was buying it and not one of these guys were cool. That's quite the glow-up, ain't it? Six gigantic singles, each of which hold up just as catchy and emotionally affecting as they did when the fat guy on the cover first showed his face back in 1995.

Admittedly, Yourself is buoyed entirely by Thomas and his batch of (at the time) newly-written melancholic tunes. Matchbox Twenty's rhythm section is solid but unremarkable, with one whole bass riff that acts as a hook (the crunchy verses on "Busted"). Rob Thomas carries this one as a solo record, his lunging, nasal delivery and tales of cheating and being abused being what sticks in your memory, and quite the sticky protagonist he is! Compared to the front half, the back half of Yourself are largely growers, far from bad tracks in their own right, but definitely not the bold statements that came prior to them. For those highly fond of the singles (like myself), those deep cuts will prove just as emotionally arresting. For everyone else, buyer beware.

Essential:	Quintessential:	Non-Essential:	Rating:
"Long Day", "Girl Like That", "Back 2 Good"	"Push"	"Argue"

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