Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too 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)

Grand instrumentation, grand emotions.

Reviewed August 14, 2024

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.