The Dave Matthews Band is moving its music forward incrementally. While Before These Crowded Streets offers more of the folky melodies and vaguely international rhythms that made this Charlottesville, Virginia, group a major record and concert draw, it also finds them adding subtle new colorings to the mix. Alanis Morissette guests on two cuts, "Spoon" and the disc's first single, "Don't Drink the Water"; banjo Bela Fleck steps in, too. Most intriguing, however, is the modernist string arrangement from the Kronos Quartet on the driving "Halloween.
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