For the past decade-plus, the Dave Matthews Band hasn’t just rested on its laurels; it’s damn near slipped into a coma. Releasing uneven studio albums and an overabundance of live retreads with similar set lists, the band has been stuck on autopilot in the worst way. They were shaken out of their stupor last August when LeRoi Moore, their saxophonist since Day One, died after an ATV accident. The band had just started sessions for Big Whiskey at the time, and Moore’s death seems to have inspired the band to their most impassioned songwriting since 1998’s Before These Crowded Streets.

Matthews deals most directly with Moore’s absence in “Why I Am,” a surging, guitar-driven jam and the band’s best songs in years. “We’ll be drinking big whiskey while we dance and sing/ and where my story ends, it’s gonna end with him/ Heaven or hell, I’m going down with the GrooGrux King.” I guess Matthews subscribes to the theory that who you’re with is more important than where you are.

Much of the rest of Big Whiskey finds Matthews looking at the big picture — “Alligator Pie” revisits a neglected New Orleans four years after Katrina; “Funny the Way It Is” skewers a society of entitlement; the sex romp “Shake Me Like a Monkey” shows the band retaining its humour in an otherwise humourless time. Still, it’s hard not to read between the lines and see references to Moore everywhere.

The subject matter may be heavy but the band’s ability to levitate musically is back. Their followers will take Big Whiskey as an emotional statement and perhaps as the rebirth of the Dave Matthews Band they once knew and loved. Casual fans will just think that they’ve finally made a good album, a little too late. Either way, it feels good to be able to write “Dave Matthews Band” and “triumph” in the same sentence again.