On the surface, Matchbox 20's debut album "Yourself or Someone Like You" sounds like another Counting Crows/Wallflowers knock-off.
And while the world could certainly live with one more hard-edged folk rock band, that band shouldn't be Matchbox 20.
Sure, they sound great. Their melodies are catchy and songwriter/vocalist Rob Thomas has a great throaty voice. The problem is, he has nothing to say.
"Yourself or Someone Like You" makes great background music. Listen to it while you're studying or dancing or doing whatever it is the kids do these days. Just do yourself a favor and don't listen to the lyrics.
If Matchbox 20 sounds strikingly like Counting Crows' "August and Everything After" or Dog's Eye View's "Happy Nowhere," it's probably because their lyrics seem to have been cut and pasted from the sleeves of those albums. The only problem is that they don't quite make sense in their new context.
In the ultra-angsty "Busted," Thomas sings "don't try to understand me." It's good advice, since for all the obscurities of its lyrics, little in the song makes a whole lot of sense.
"I dreamed that the buildings all fell down / we sat on my back porch and watched it / in my head the sound like 15 strangers dancing," he sings. Sure the first part sounds kind of cool. But what does it mean? What does 15 strangers dancing sound like?
In "3 a.m.," Thomas sings "She says it's all gonna end and it might as well be my fault / and she only sleeps when it's raining / and she screams and her voice is straining." Also, "She thinks that happiness is a mat that sits on her doorway."
Confusing, obtuse and superficial lyrics are no stand-in for meaningful ones.
Their first single, "Push," contains gems like: "I don't know why you couldn't just stay with me / you couldn't stand to be near me / when my face don't seem to want to shine / cuz it's a little bit dirty..."
In addition to the well-worn vocabulary of its lyrics, Matchbox 20 has a lot of ex-girlfriend issues to work out.
"Push" has a radio-friendly melody, but its chorus repeats, "I wanna push you down, I will, I will / I wanna take you for granted."
"Long Day," "Argue," "Hang" and "Shame" are all about bad break-ups too, as is "Girl Like That" -- a poor man's version of "Anna Begins."
Other songs are even more silly and suffer from an over-active street vernacular. "Damn" sounds almost like a satire of angst-ridden alternative music: "This old world, well don't it make you wanna think 'damn' / this cold girl, well don't she make you wanna scream, 'damn.'"
"Busted" tells the story of a couple who is "too cool to be alone, but not too crazy to get busted."
The album does have some bright spots. "Kody" tells of a man with a broken-down life on a broken-down road. "Kody" succeeds by staying away from the abstract but absurd lyrics that plague the rest of the album.
Like many other Matchbox 20 songs, "Kody" jumps back and forth between different points of view. It's a neat trick and, done well, it would make a collection of great songs.
Thomas gets into different voices pretty well. The problem is all the characters on "Yourself or Someone Like You" want to sound a lot deeper than they are. Their Gen-X philosophizing distracts from a set of well produced songs with great hooks.
Matchbox 20 doesn't seem to know the difference between zany and profound or wacky and insightful. The album's sleeve contains the band's shoe sizes (funny) but also includes moody black-and-white photos of the depressed band members (dorky).
There is room for improvement. They could do an album of cover songs, which would sound great. Or they could just drop the arty pretension and stick with the tangible world.
