Album A Day: Matchbox Twenty – Yourself or Someone Like You

So this is coming a little later than I was hoping, but nonetheless, here ’tis, a lovely album with which to end a long day.

I think Matchbox Twenty’s success in the 90s is a fairly unique occurrence. When Yourself or Someone Like You came out it was praised for successfully navigating the waters of a period of mainstream music where alternative music was still in vogue to some degree (though not in the extreme sense of grunge), while at the same time more adult-friendly pop and rock were starting to reclaim the spotlight. Today if a band manages to plant itself into categories like that where on the one hand it’s adult friendly contemporary music and on the other hand it’s got enough bite for a wider audience to enjoy, it gets slammed as being the pinnacle of mediocrity, or worse (one need only look at what happened to Nickelback).

Regardless, what Matchbox Twenty did on this album is fantastic. Rob Thomas is a pretty great songwriter, and his half-smooth, half-gravel voice lets him sell the best moments on both emotional sides on this record, be it the fuck-you chorus of “Push” or the worried serenading of “3 A.M.” And even though the band comes off as a bit harsh, which they do in moments like “Long Day” and “Damn”, there’s at least some feeling behind that forcefulness that shows they just overdid it, rather than trying to overcompensate for something. And even though the album feels a bit one-sided with all the great songs coming in the first 7 tracks, there’s enough interesting filler on Yourself or Someone Like You to warrant more than just uploading the singles to an iPod and trashing the disc. Yourself or Someone Like You wasn’t just a great start to a fairly good career for Matchbox Twenty, it was a unique moment in the 90s where splitting the difference was actually a good thing.

Matchbox Twenty – 3 AM [iTunes] (YSI)

==TJ==