Dave Matthews Band – Away from the World (2012)

About halfway through his band’s first new album in three years, Dave Matthews announces, “I’m too old to wanna be younger now.” It’s an apt summation of where his head’s at on this 11-song set, which reunites the Dave Matthews Band with original producer Steve Lillywhite for the first time since 1988 — not counting the aborted 2000 sessions whose songs later surfaced on 2002’s “Busted Stuff.”

After the more full-bodied and bombastic tone of 2009’s “Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King,” “Away From the World” is more restrained, moody and subtle. It has its big footprint moments, of course, and there’s an audible ambition that gives the album a crackling if slow-burning energy. The album is also decidedly inward-looking: with a couple of ruminations about the world out large (such as first single “Mercy” and “Gaucho”), “Away From the World” focuses on love, relationships and parental responsibility, making it both musically and lyrically a kind of state of the DMB union. The band is as intriguing and adventurous now as it was when the Lillywhite-produced “Under the Table and Dreaming” came out 18 years ago.

What are some of the standouts on DMB’s latest full-length? Check out our track-by-track breakdown of “Away From the World”:

1. Broken Things
2. Belly Belly
3. Mercy
4. Gaucho
5. Sweet
6. The Riff
7. Belly Full
8. If Only
9. Rooftop
10. Snow Outside
11. Drunken Soldier

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