Billboard
"Big Whiskey" is a big moment for the Dave Matthews Band -- it's the act's first album in four years and first since the sudden August death of founding saxophonist (and titular king) LeRoi Moore. But this eulogy is a celebration, and "Big Whiskey" is a dense, humid album that, befitting its New Orleans origins, shrewdly cuts its melancholy with exuberance and vice versa. "Shake Me Like a Monkey" is classic DMB stutter-stepping funk, "Squirm" is an Eastern-flavored epic, "Why I Am" is a radio-directed bottle rocket with a sneaky little time shift, and "Time Bomb" unfolds into a full-blast rocker with Matthews doing his best Eddie Vedder. Moore's ghost haunts throughout -- the saxman's fluttery work appears sporadically, most clearly on the sweet, sad "Lying in the Hands of God" -- and the band clearly poured grief into the swelling carpe diem tune "Dive In." Matthews' lyrics can be of the make-love-shine variety, and there are a few meandering detours as usual, but "Big Whiskey" finds the band at its most pointed and purposeful in years.
