MATT WHITE
"BEST DAYS"
(Geffen, 2007)
I'll be honest ... while listening to it the first time, I wasn't all that impressed with Matt White's full-length debut album, "Best Days". One song after another came and went without so much as a nod of the head or a tap of the toe to any of them. That is, until track 5 came along. The song, simply entitled "Love", grabbed me (as vigorously as a sweet, bouncy little song like that can), and the rest of the album never let go. Silly me, I only thought I knew what it meant to have an album "sneak up" on me until now. This one truly did.
There may not be much variety in the subject matter -- almost all the songs are about love -- but what the album lacks in that respect it makes up for in the range of sounds. There seems to be a fairly significant '70s influence on the album (the '70s funk of "Play" and the AM-radio pop of "Love"), but White manages to deftly stir his various influences together in innovative ways to come up with other excellent tracks like the straight-ahead rocker "Anybody Else" (which is very reminiscent of Maroon 5), the lovely ballads "Just What I'm Looking For" and "Miracles" (which shows how amazingly nimble his voice is), as well as a pseudo-tropical/ska hybrid in "New York Girls".
Knowing my affinity for male singer/songwriters, maybe it was inevitable that I'd like Matt White. But there are plenty of singer/songwriters that I haven't liked ... and he did manage to win me over more quickly than most others in that category. It remains to be seen if he has any staying power, but I have a feeling he'll be hanging out in my CD collection for the long haul.
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