A light touch may be the rarest thing in current rock, but the Dave Matthews Band has it. On its third and best album, "Crash" (RCA), the band adds a little optimism and a lot of melody to what was already a buoyant, crowd-pleasing style.
The group's previous albums captured a band with a gift for the groove, which built its audience along the tie-dyed, neo-hippie dance-concert circuit. But from the beginning, the Dave Matthews Band stood apart from the rehashed 1960's material of bands like Blues Traveler and the Spin Doctors.
Matthews, on vocals and guitar, and his band are fascinated by patterns and problem solving; the music is transparent, revealing every detail. Their lineup is largely acoustic, except for an electric bass, and without the roar and sustain of electric guitar, their dance vamps aim for a true couterpoint of pinpoint, interlocking parts.
Matthews's guitar lines are full of wide leaps and unexpected syncopations, cross-timed against Stefan Lessard's bass and Carter Beauford's drums. Boyd Tinsley's violin and Leroi Moore's saxophone answer with countermelodies, ryhmic pizzicati and an occasional extended solo. Musicianly feats that used to be confined to progressive rock, like odd meters or skipped beats, are tucked behind a folky surface, but only sounds like a hootenanny.
On the band's previous albums, Matthews usually let his vocal lines mesh with the instrumental latticework. But in pop songs, vocals aren't just one part among equals; they hold the emotional center of a song. Matthews, who writes the lyrics and collaborates ont he music, has accepted the convention, and the new songs are stronger for it. His voice is aching baritone, mixing the groans of Sting with Bono's falsetto, but the nimble music prevents him from sounding sodden.
While Matthews spent most of the band's previous album, "Under the Table and Dreaming" (RCA) detailing drudgery and pessimism, he has cheered up for "Crash" (RCA). Now his message is to seize the day. Alone with a female friend in "Say Goodbye," he urges her to share a one night stand, "and tomorrow go back to your man"; "Tripping Billies," remade from the band's first album, quotes the truism, "Eat, drink and be merry/ For tomorrow we die." Matthews sings straightforwardly about desire and unrequited love; in "Crash Into Me," he confesses, "I'm bareboned and crazy for you." But the band's truest pleasures are non-verbal, in the cooperative glee behind each clockwork vamp.
The band still builds grooves that zip along on quick-plucked guitar notes and the brisk cymbal offbeats. Songs like "Two Step" and "Drive In, Drive Out" unfold with variation upon variation. Now the band brings that same ingenuity to ballads. "Let You Down" matches a simple plea for forgiveness to quiet but shifting guitar crosscurrents; despair doesn't affect the band's intricacy. When the Dave Matthews Band seizes a moment, it's well prepared.