Will ‘Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King be Matthews’ Best Seller?

‘Big Whiskey and GrooGrux King’ hits shelves

"Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King" cover

The Dave Matthews Band has released “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King,” an album that the Chicago Sun-Times says “almost didn’t happen.”

The Dave Matthews Band lost its saxophonist LeRoi Moore last year when Moore died after an ATV accident. Perhaps this event compelled the Dave Matthews Band to release “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King,” which was named in honor of Moore.

‘Whiskey’ on the rocks

The Chicago Sun-Times music reporter, Jim DeRogatis (who is decidedly not a Dave Matthews Band fan, by the way), says that even before Moore’s accident, the Dave Matthews Band “debating whether to continue their stadium-filling corporate enterprise, having lost much of their drive.”

But continue they did, and the Dave Matthews Band released its seventh studio album, “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King,” to rave reviews. Many music critics, aside from DeRogatis, are calling it the band’s best.

But before you get a cash advance and buy it right away, listen to a  sample from Paste Magazine.

Good reviews

Greg Kot from the Chicago Tribune is among those who consider “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King” the Dave Matthews Bands’ best. He writes:

Moore’s saxophone solos begin and end the 13-song album, and his spirit informs the rest, a series of restless tracks obsessed with fleeting pleasures and final reckonings. … It bristles with an urgency lacking in most every other Matthews Band release; since its 1993 debut, the band has never rocked quite so hard.

Dave Fricke from Rolling Stone gave “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King” four stars out of five. He writes:

Producer Rob Cavallo, working with DMB for the first time, has brought some of the classic-rock edge of his hit records with Green Day and My Chemical Romance to Matthews’ arena-size spin on early-Seventies Traffic, like the power-chord punctuation and slithering-fuzz flourishes behind Matthews’ bad-news snarl in “Squirm.”

Making money, Dave Matthews style

Fricke also mentions in his review that the Dave Matthews Band is “one of America’s best-selling bands.”

Wikipedia confirms the superstar selling power of the Dave Matthews Band. Though the band’s album sales have fluctuated and fallen along with the economy and the music industry as a whole, the Dave Matthews Band remains a money-making powerhouse.

The Dave Matthews Band’s first two albums, 1993’s “Under the Table and Dreaming” and 1996’s “Crash,” remain their best-selling records. The band’s debut album sold 6 million copies in the United States and went gold in Canada. “Crash” sold 7 million copies in the U.S. and went multi-platinum in Canada as well.

Topping the charts

Curiously, neither of the Dave Matthews Band’s first two albums rose to the top of the charts in the U.S., although “Crash” did make it to No. 2. However, though album sales declined on subsequent albums, all four of the Dave Matthews Band’s following albums hit No. 1 on the charts in the U.S.