Album Review: ‘The Great Unknown’ is ‘why did Rob Thomas record this crap?’

Album Review: Rob Thomas’s ‘The Great Unknown’

One of the founding fathers of yarling and butt rock is back with a confusing wreckage of “songs” that are sure to bewilder if not exactly entertain.

Without Santana or Matchbox 20 behind him, he sounds like one of your many run-of-the-mill American Idol contestants turned public irritant. From one listen to “The Great Unknown,” someone who is unfamiliar with Rob Thomas’ misdeeds with Matchbox 20 might be led to believe that he was previously in a boy band, because the songs feature almost no musicianship whatsoever. All the work seems to have been done in the sound booth by an engineer. He may have written and sung the songs—but in this case, that’s not something to brag about.

The fact that this album was put out by Atlantic Records is hard evidence that there is no longer any correlation between talent and being signed by a label. Indie musicians are running circles—nay, spheres—around this washed-up has-been. Thomas may be making a living doing this, but dudes flipping burgers are making a living, too—and they at least have their dignity. Thomas is just resting on his undeserved laurels at this point.

“The Great Unknown” is just kind of there. It’s an album. It has no reason to exist. It does nothing new, and what it imitates has been done better before. If Rob Thomas’ albums are his children, he should’ve worn a condom this time.

“I Think We’d Feel Good Together” opens with a standard “orchestra hit” patch melody. As a result, the album begin with a cringe, but there’s also an element of suspense. It’s like that feeling in a horror movie when there’s a monster around the corner or down the hall, but you can’t see what it is yet. Like much of everything else in this genre—uber-bland pop—it’s not that it’s really so terrible so much as it is just incredibly unremarkable.

At least “Trust You” opens with acoustic guitar. Kinda. Well, that’s the initial thought. Ok, it’s a sampled acoustic guitar, cut up like that horse from “The Cell” and topped with layers of a monotonously pounding drum machine and other forgettable dancehall production. But it becomes immediately apparent that the four-chord ad naseum merry-go-round wouldn’t fare any better with live band treatment. Thomas sounds like an uninspired Beyoncé.

“Hold On Forever” is similar, with a guitar played so robotically that it almost conjures images of an automated bear performing onstage at Chuck E. Cheese. Now, take a moment and ask yourself, “How lazy can a man be?” Is it necessary to program a machine to play a stomp-clap rhythm for you? Are Thomas’ hands and feet so precious that you wouldn’t dare cause them any undue wear and tear with stomping and clapping? Sprinkle a few campy echoey glockenspiel and piano lines—”performed” by MIDI—and something that could have at least been slightly endearing is just pure fluff.

There are several crimes committed in “Wind It Up.” Where to start? Ok, it’s a sin to combine the banjo with any electronic medium. Béla Fleck took it as far as it can tastefully go, putting the banjo in a fusion jazz format. He illustrates the difference between being a pioneer and a rapist. Country music gorillas have already painfully hybridized hip hop with country, mixing banjo with EDM influences. Thomas is now working the opposite end, sticking a random banjo into his little travesty. Opening it with mandolin was ok—the mandolin was ruined long ago. Although the dance hit, “Cotton Eye Joe,” tried to deflower the banjo completely, it maintained some dignity. But “Wind It Up” is too much. May as well stomp on the poor thing. Lyrically, though, the song is an homage to not sleeping, which I’d give points for originality if there weren’t overtones of crystal meth.

Starting the next song with the lyric, “Everybody wanna get high again and stay up all night long,” does nothing to lessen the impression that Thomas is tweaking. Thinking about how long his teeth will last in “One Shot” is the only thing to distract from what otherwise sounds like one of Disney’s hideous musical abortions. It’s like a three-minute lesson on how not to write and record a song.

The title track opens slower and more introspective. Preceding it with five awful songs was an excellent idea. After drinking five glasses of urine, a cup of spit would taste like ambrosia. Despite the constant pretense of Thomas’ quivering voice—which always sounds like he is shivering while trying to sing after having consumed two full pots of coffee—“The Great Unknown” isn’t a bad song at all. It’s hard to say that it’s great, but bookended by crap, it’s definitely a breath of fresh air. If Thomas can write music like this … why doesn’t he? (I blame the public.)

“Absence of Affection” moves back toward EDM, but this time it’s less transparently imitating every Top 40 blunder made over the past decade than the first five tracks. A corny four-on-the-floor beat is substituted by smart post-80s drums. Yeah, the synth trumpets are kind of obnoxious, and the backing vocals are dumb, but the bass line has just enough disco swagger to nearly cover up the song’s weaknesses. It’s the promising first draft of a potentially B or A- song, but Thomas unfortunately stopped there, satisfied with a C-.

Slipping back into the mire, “Things You Said” features more of the artless production that the album opened with. At least it opens (and ends) with a weird sample, and in the middle there’s a snippet of a guy yelling stuff. That’s kind of creative.

“Paper Dolls” slows down, like “The Great Beyond,” but it lacks the honesty, and “NLYTM” apparently wasn’t worth spelling out, sounding like something Maroon 5 accidentally wrote in their sleep.

The second-not-worst song of the “The Great Beyond” is “Heaven Help Me.” It gets points for featuring a mellow tremolo guitar and a poppy beat, giving the ears a break. It falters under the weight of the pile of clichés Thomas shovels onto the lyrics, but one can forgive that out of gratitude for a reprieve from the past three songs.

“Lie To Me” again isn’t awful, but it suffers from the same production schtick that much of the album does. Like that moment when the instrumentation drops out so he can drop his lyrical hook. This is like the cheap thrill in a horror movie when something jumps out from wherever—the lowest-hanging fruit a horror director can reach for—and scares the crickets out of everyone. It works once or twice, but it’s just corny every other time.

If you can’t play the piano, please don’t! “Pieces” would’ve come across better on a guitar. The half-heartedly executed, elementary-school-level piano part isn’t interesting enough to warrant backing up with strings, which rather come across as an attempt to prop up the piano. Whatever, a couple of session players made a few hundred bucks that day. At least some good came of it.

The remarkably bland “The Great Unknown” is an album for people who live under rocks and diehard Rob Thomas fans. There’s just nothing here. Rarely has a musician ever put out an album of so little substance. Bleh.

Rob Thomas Great Unknown album review

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