REVIEWS:
Matthew Sweet is a '90s power-pop demi-god who loves anime, got his ass kicked by Weird Al on "Win Ben Stein's Money" and has crafted a series of critically-acclaimed guitar-pop albums that sell for really cheap on half.com. He can't seem to come up with a more complex counter-harmony than "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH," but his yummy, crunchy contribution to the annals of rock music is still a total and unending delight to listen to, his hired session guitarists rock down the house a good 90% of the time, and it's just hard to hate a guy who not only has the actual last name "Sweet," but is also nearing 40 and still has such a cutesy little blue-eyed baby face. He took a few albums to really get going, but his early stuff is out of print anyway and I've only heard it because I'm a hopeless completist.
--Rich Bunnell
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COMMENTS
Isnt this that guy who did that song that was on the radio sometime in the past?
Hi! I really enjoyed your reviews of Mr. Sweet's entire catalogue. Although I shant agree with your unfair assessment of Blue Sky on Mars' straight-forwardness (it's the first album of his I purchased, as well as the one that got me interested in his other works), I do, however, agree implicitly with your sentiments towards In Reverse (which is my personal favorite of his ,also - and believe me, Girlfriend alone is practically my god).
It was a pleasant surprise to stumble apon this site and find that someone else (apart from the fans I keep in contact at the Matthew Sweet BBoard - ''www.matthew-sweet.com'' if you're interested in partaking in the fun) has actually heard of Inside and Earth (and, at the risk of sounding corny, I rather enjoy the two - occasionally, that is).
Anyway, just wanted to let you know that it was a pleasant read! Keep in touch, there are too few of us 'sweeties' out there, haha
P.S.: I heard that Matthew Sweet himself is also displeased with the tracks that run into each other on BSOM; A glitch that aroused while pressing the record, I believe. Oh well, I always listen to it from top to bottom anyway!
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Sweet's pre-'90s career is usually totally ignored and written off in a manner similar to Stevie Wonder's adolescent pre-Music Of My Mind repertoire, but it's still worth noting the existence of his first two albums since it seems inhuman that any human being could deliver an album like Girlfriend the first time out of the gate. His self-written debut album was also almost entirely self-produced, with Sweet playing most of the instruments backed up by a drum machine, but instead of the home-grown Ram feel you'd expect of an album of such a sort it all just ends up sounding like overproduced corporate rock. People who accuse the guy's later '90s power pop albums of being bland and mannered should really give this one a listen -- this is bland to the nth degree, with catchy but almost completely faceless overdriven synth + guitar melodies all over the place. Hell, some of the songs barely even have melodies as opposed to "arrangements acting as melodies" - "By Herself" takes the tired old guitar line seen previously in Boston's "More Than A Feeling" and probably about 10,000 other songs and augments it with a bunch of lame synth horns and twinkly noises, and "Catch Your Breath," no joke, sounds like Prince. I am not kidding. Matthew Sweet has recorded a song that sounds like Prince. That's actually kind of an interesting idea, but the problem is that it's not just Prince, it's really really bad Prince. Now let us never speak of that song again.
Besides those two songs, the album doesn't dip into the level of "annoyingly bad," but the only songs I can say that I actively enjoy are "Blue Fools," which actually ventures close to having a subtle, gorgeously layered melody (marred only by some dated beep-beep noises) and "Half Asleep," which takes a bunch of admittedly-obvious synth power chords and makes a great guilty-pleasure '80s pomp anthem out of them. "Brotherhood" has a really catchy chorus, too, though the rest of the song isn't really anything special, just your basic chimey corporate '80s guitar rock. Otherwise, the album's just a wide expanse of predictable blandness, stuff like "Quiet Her" and "We Lose Another Day," whose melodies and chord sequences can be completely mapped out within the first few seconds of hearing the song, sitting alongside listenable and hummable but unspectacular ballads like "Love I Trusted" and the single "Save Time For Me." This is one of those "surprisingly listenable" albums that slightly impresses on the first listen until the realization of its irritating mediocrity hits you like a ten ton bag of petrified oranges, and I do not wish to speak of it anymore as I am above this silly plebeian nonsense.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Like Inside, this album won't be winning any popularity contests in the near future unless glossy synth-rock suddenly stages a comeback and this album is randomly throned as its primary influence, but this is a bit more enjoyable and interesting of an album than the debut, if only marginally. Sweet's one-man band shtick from the last spin around is still solidly in place with the crucial difference that this time he's joined by the presence of a couple of ace guitarists, Robert Quine (formerly of Richard Hell and the Voidoids) and Richard Lloyd (formerly of Television). Their talent doesn't really shine through on any of the material here, but the mere presence of three guitars in itself gives the album a solid backbone that the debut was really lacking. Plus, the added guitar presence gives Sweet an excuse to tone the synths down a bit; they're still there, but they're definitely not as upfront and intrusive on the album's overall sound as was the case before. It still winds up sounding like streamlined corporate rock, but this time it's tight and professional and without any outright embarassments of the "Catch Your Breath" variety, which is sort of a plus. I'd even go so far as to say that the first four songs are pretty damn good as far as this type of stuff goes -- "When I Feel Again" with its clunky sound would fit on the next album if it weren't so polished and needlessly shiny, and the organ fade-in which opens the pulsing mid-tempo rocker "Easy" gets the disc off to a pretty impressive start.
Don't let this faint praise lead you astray of my actual judgment, though -- the album's still boring. I was just trying to emphasize that artistic growth was taking place, for what little it's worth, even on this early formulative stuff that absolutely nobody cares about. The rest of the album is mostly just a load of average shiny rock music with all of the edges polished clean into smooth nothingness, easy on the ears but pretty dull when said ears actually try to perk up and pay attention. Once again the album's single, "Vertigo," lies smack-dab in the middle of the album and does hardly anything to distinguish itself at all; it's a pretty catchy song but mostly because of the atmospheric guitar line taken almost directly from the Who's "Rael." "Love," with a title so generic that it made it so I had to go out and buy the damn album because it was the only song I couldn't find on MP3 because I couldn't look up the title on Audiogalaxy or Morpheus without coming up with 10,000 copies of "You Don't Love Me" and "Where You Get Love," is your average slow-dance-wannabe filler, and the last couple of tracks are a total step backwards even at this early stage of the guy's musical career, almost completely lacking in any sort of hooks or, well, anything of the sort that would make me ever want to listen to them again in my entire life. The ways in which the album one-ups the debut are crucial, but in spite of what praise that might merit it's still not some of the better music you'll hear during your time on this planet. It's like Bryan Adams, only American, and with about half of the "suck" sponged out into Jeff Lynne's waiting throat.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
This is one of those albums that sounds so much more assured than anything that came before that it's hard to believe that it came from the same artist. In a sense it didn't -- Sweet recorded this time around with not only the backbone of a full band (with not only Quine and Lloyd hanging around, but also Lloyd Cole on rhythm guitar and Velvet Crush drummer Rick Menck on the sticks) but also a set of beefed-up production values, strangely from Fred Maher, the same dude who made Earth sound like a sheet of pure laminated blandness. Sweet wrote all of the songs, though, so in the end the credit goes to him for what can only be seen as a monumental leap forward in songwriting skill -- suddenly the songs, instead of being merely listenable, actually jump right out into your face and riff away with simple yet absolutely magnificent melodies. Modern rock radio took notice and turned the upbeat title track (with a fantastic guitar intro and a vocal melody that almost tops it) into a hit, with the riffy studio monster "Divine Intervention" and the harmonically-perfect pop of "I've Been Waiting" receiving recognition as well. They're fantastic singles, epitomizing the heights that power pop can rise to when it's backed up by solid musicianship and melodies that don't veer close to the chasm of irritating genericism.
The rest of the album, with a few exceptions, is like one big highlight, with the chunky, crisp religious rock of "Holy War" and "Evangeline" sitting alongside yearning ballads like "You Don't Love Me" and "Your Sweet Voice," and almost every single song has that distinct sing-along-in-the-car quality, which is easy to do since Sweet has that Everyman power pop voice that isn't very distinctive but almost anyone can imitate. Sing along with your Sweet voice, huh huh huh -- nevermind, that sucked. Even the throwaway "I Wanted To Tell You" would've been the best song on Inside, and "Looking At The Sun" is just a perfect little midtempo track with an addictive, clunky riff that does a fine job of reassuring the listener that the rest of the album won't be a letdown after the mighty opening triad of singles. Plus, "Looking at the sun burned my eyes out" is a neat lyric, which is certainly a noteable exception in Sweet's body of work (his lyrics are never that great as opposed to "generic in a way that still fits the song," which isn't necessarily a bad thing).
Looking at the tracklisting, I feel like I'm looking at the tracklisting of a hits collection -- in fact, funnily enough, this album is better than Sweet's actual hits collection. The country ballad "Winona" is great. The flamenco-ish "Thought I Knew You" is great. The yearning "Don't Go" is great. Hell, it's all great, except for "Does She Talk?" which is one of the worst songs I've ever heard in my life. Other than that annoyingly misogynistic, generic piece of shit (Sweet even censors himself in the chorus, which is, literally, "I can, you up the! And you can, me up the!" -- why not just, y'know, not write the song?), the album is yummy and exuberantly poppy in a crunchy and tasteable way, and even if it's over an hour long and sounds kind of boring at first, almost every song has the definite possibility of winning you over and making you a member of its own little song fan club. If you're going to buy one power pop album, it'll probably end up being Weezer's debut no matter what I recommend, but be sure to put this one high on your priorities list too.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I realize that the term "altered beast" had existed for quite a while before the arcade game "Altered Beast" was released, but you just know that Matt didn't name the album that because it's a fittingly poetic term for his state of mind at the time of the recording -- he did it because of the arcade game. In fact, I'll bet you that one day he was just pumping quarters into that sucker when he took a look up at the title above the screen and thought "Y'know what? I'm gonna call my next album that." Go ahead, ask him, I bet it's true. As for the actual album, it's a bit of a sharp left turn after the solid power-pop crunch of Girlfriend. The catchiness is still there, but the sound is a lot less direct and more enveloping (the mix just surrounds you on all sides), and, most importantly, the girlfriend who was the subject of the previous album's title must've left him in the dust, because about 3/4 of the lyrics on the album are just dripping with pissed-off bitterness. If you're standing up, sit down, because the words I'm about to speak will likely surprise and confuse you: Matthew Sweet sings the word "fuck" on this album. I am dead serious. In fact, the song he sings it on ("The Ugly Truth") is reprised on the album's second half in a rock arrangement, so he sings it twice. So, there you have it: actual recorded proof that Matthew Sweet has spoken the word "fuck" at least twice in his life. "Sweet," my left foot -- he should change his name to Matthew Pottymouth.
This ceaselessly-bitter tone is reflected over the course of almost the entire album, sort of detracting from the music at some points (especially on the incredibly awkward "Knowing People," which has a lot of bite but not much else except a really stupid chorus), which ends up being the album's main problem. In painting the album with a thick coat of bile, a lot of the tunefulness is either sacrificed or covered up to the point of unrecognizability, even though seing that it's power pop it's still catchier than most music out there. Most of the really great songs are front-loaded at the beginning of the album - "Dinosaur Act" sounds like "Divine Intervention"s stomping, twisted evil cousin and manages to rock out even more thanks to a busier arrangement, "Devil With The Green Eyes" shows Sweet's mastery of harmony in full force, the aforementioned "Ugly Truth" is demented count-ray music of the finest brand, and "Time Capsule" is a great clunky little mid-tempo single. There's also a clip from the movie Caligula put smack-dab into the middle of the album where Malcolm McDowell pompously declares himself to be a god by the unanimous decree of the Senate. I'm not too sure why it was put onto the album, but it's hilarious, and when the guitars charge up after the line "He's a god now" to begin the next song, the effect is just perfect.
The rest of the album has its highs and its lows, but the only song that really gets me going on the second half is "Do It Again," thanks to a great chorus. Otherwise, it's split between some uninteresting riff-rock ("In Too Deep," boring in an entirely different way than the Genesis song) and decent-but-nothing-more stabs at balladry ("Reaching Out" and the closer "Evergreen"). Of some note instrumentally is that frequent Rolling Stones session man Nicky Hopkins shows up on piano on a few tracks at the end of the album, but none of the songs are really among the album's best. Plus, his parts tend to be buried in the mix, so it's hard to squeeze out his contribution unless you're really paying attention. Final verdict on the album: pretty decent, and actually one of his most interesting, but it's a bit lacking in the consistency department. You'll want this if you have Girlfriend since it can serve as a sort of "evil twin" companion album in a way, but keep in mind that you probably won't immediately enjoy it as much.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Every artist who releases "the difficult album" knows that it's record company policy to demand that the following album be catchy, brainless and radio-ready to compensate for that album's inevitable commercial failure. Granted, Altered Beast wasn't exactly Sweet Mask Replica and was filled with catchy, accessible songs that just happened to have slightly more edgy instrumentation and pissed-off lyrics than before, but Sweet still felt obligated to taunt the airwaves with material that doesn't need to be analyzed any further than "Wow, he sure loves that girl. Hey, this song has a guitar in it. Also, drums. Woo." This was the album that came to be, and to tell you the truth it sounds pretty much like the last two albums except for the fact that Sweet obviously isn't aiming for any sort of lyrical or musical depth. Originality and deeper meaning doesn't seem to be the point -- it's all about the catchy melodies this time 'round, with stuff like "Come To Love" and especially the minor hit single "Sick Of Myself" based pretty much around riffs everyone's heard before (the latter is probably the 45,000th rewrite of the "Sweet Jane" riff, which has got to be the most influential set of notes ever penned), but don't take that as an insult. This is really catchy stuff, totally living up to the album title and standing as one of the most brainlessly-appealing listens I've ever experienced, multiple times.
So yeah, the album isn't chock full of inspiration, but it's a blast anyway - case in point: there's a song on here called "Super Baby," with a big, dumb, obvious riff and the chorus "Honey you're the one, oh, super ba-by!" And it's freaking awesome. Case in point #2: the single "Sick Of Mys......aw, shit, I already mentioned that one. That's intelligent structuring for you. Uhm.... "Walk Out" is a fun organ-driven psychedelic pop song, "We're The Same" is smiley-faced chimey pop heaven, and "Get Older" is a song which contains both lyrics and instruments organized in a manner which appeals to me. The balladry isn't as impressive -- "Everything Changes" will have you thinking "Wow, what a well-structured chorus!" as opposed to "Wow, Matthew Sweet is the god of contemplative balladry, and I want to carry his child in my male uterus!" and "I Almost Forgot" could've been written by anybody, including Judge Reinhold and that dumbass kid from the Dell commercials. On the other hand, the closer "Smog Moon" might just be the best song on the album, so the ballads don't reek blandness across the board, but on the whole it's a good thing he sticks to the crunchy poppy stuff for a good 3/4 of the running time. It's not Sweet's best collection of tunes, but it's certainly his most immediately-appealing (all of his music is appealing, but this is the one that doesn't sound boring the first time you hear it unless you're Nick Karn circa 1999) and the Quine-Lloyd guitar interplay is as solid as ever.
Sweet's commercial ploy ended up working, for the most part, and the album managed to go gold (which means that less than 5% of people own it than own Shania Twain's Come On Over, but let's forget about that distressing detail for now), which basically means that this is the one that pops up in used bins all the time. This is sad in that it indicates that a large amount of people are guilty of the sin of selling a poppy near-masterwork, but good in that in means that you'll be able to inherit the album from their undeserving hands as its rightful owner. And thus the cycle of justice completes itself and the world is safe.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Anybody who's ever accused Matthew Sweet of embodying all of the most generic aspects of power pop probably have their best argument with this album. Determined to make an artistic statement of his own, Sweet parted ways with Quine and Lloyd and opted to perform all of this album's guitar parts on his own, and even though that's an admirable and commendable move (would you want to be known solely for the talent of your recruited sidemen?), in the end it makes the album sound a whole lot like 100% Fun without all of the cool riffs. Add to that the unfortunate fact that this split happened to coincide with a dry period in Sweet's songwriting (the last three albums were held up by the guitar work, but the songs were still damn good on their own) and you get the sum total of a bit of a bland listening experience. This flaw especially comes to a head in two songs positioned as the album's standout tracks, the opener "Come To California" and the single "Where You Get Love," which both seem to be intended as riff-rockers, but the "riffs" don't come across as particularly impressive. The latter in fact, while really catchy, is probably one of Sweet's weakest singles, with a chorus built on almost the exact same swirling riff that made Cheap Trick's "Dream Police" so great, only in a much more mannered and less interesting context. Apu would never sing this song.
The album isn't a failure, though, in case you got the wrong idea - even though it's not up to Sweet's by-now-expected level of crunchy quality, it's a hell of a lot better than his first two albums, that's for sure. "Behind The Smile" is a neat rocker with a bridge drowned in mellotron in the best possible way, "Hollow" is one of Sweet's better creepy, harmonic ballads, and though "Back To You" will never win any originality contests, it's fun to hear Matt's take on the typical wall-of-guitar power-pop songwriting style. Still, "Until It Breaks" is probably the most formulaic ballad the guy's ever written, though it somehow managed to end up on his hits compilation anyway, and the second half of the album, though filled with straightforward and appealing songs like "All Over My Head" and "Make Believe," is marred by an overall lack of distinctiveness in the material and too many short throwaway tracks like "Over It" and "Make Believe" which don't seem too concerned with establishing their presence as actual songs. There's nothing really wrong with the album, but coming on the heels of the last few it's bound to come off as rather annoyingly disappointing, and, though it has no bearing on the music within, the space-themed cover art strikes me as kind of a half-assed parody of prog-rock album covers (even with lettering by Yes-man Roger Dean).
Also, though this bears no impact on the grade, how come every track on the CD starts at the end of the previous track? It's really irritating -- for the longest time, I thought that "Behind The Smile" had a cool sped-up intro, but it turns out that it was just carrying over from the end of "Hollow." Was it to keep people from copying the songs onto MP3? In 1997? Did artists even consider them a threat at the time? Napster didn't even come out until two years later!
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
After the dry, simple approach taken on Blue Sky On Mars turned out not to amount to much of anything really interesting, Sweet apparently came to grips with the fact that he's better off working with heaps and gobs of recruited sidemen, and went on to assemble the biggest ensemble of musicians he'd ever brought together for a single project. For four of this album's tracks, Sweet acted as conductor to a virtual orchestra of no less than seventeen musicians, in hopes of both paying tribute to and recreating the vibe of Phil Spector's patented "wall of sound" production style. Such an experiment could easily have collapsed under its own pompous weight, much like many of Phil Spector's own projects, but surprisingly the four songs using the ensemble are all utterly spectacular, with some of Sweet's best melodies joined together with rich, creamy, pitch-perfect production. "If Time Permits" with its dreamy, half-awake feel easily ranks as one of his all-time greats, and the nine-minute, multi-part closer "Thunderstorm" does a great job of exploiting the wide range of the orchestra's talents while managing to hit upon pretty much all of the strongest aspects of Sweet's songwriting style.
Successful gimmickry aside, the album is definitely one of Sweet's most interesting and, at least in my opinion, by far his best. The album title could be interpreted in several ways -- either as symbolic of Sweet's return to his full-band roots, representative of the highly-retro, power-pop psychedelia sound displayed on several of the tracks, or just a cool title to go with the confusing, upside-down liner note art. Whatever the case, there isn't a single bad song on the album, and the best moments easily match and beat anything on Girlfriend totally into the ground -- and if you've read the rest of the page, you know that that's a freakin' compliment. Even though the multi-musician ensemble is only employed on four tracks, the feel is still reflected in the rest of the material, from the awesome drum sound which propels the opener "Millennium Blues" to the horns and backwards guitars plastered all over my favorite Sweet song of all time, the watery single "What Matters." Even the more formulaic album tracks like the tender "Trade Places" and the standard obligatory rock song "Faith In You" are performed with such energy and conviction that they rank above all similar material in Sweet's catalogue, and you have to hand it for a guy who names a song "Untitled" and actually uses the word in the song's chorus.
A lot of people write this one off as Generic Matthew Sweet Album #5 and merely a slight rebound after the absolute misstep of his career, but for me it signals a total musical and artistic rebirth for the guy and stands as not only his greatest album, but also one of my all-time favorites. "Beware My Love," "Future Shock," "I Should Never Have Let You Know".....wow. He even manages to crank out a cheerfully-bitter attack against critics who label him as a simplistic power pop hack while completely justifying his side of the argument musically by backing it up with one of the catchiest melodies he's ever written. "Why don't you write your own song, if mine doesn't do it for you?" Nah, that won't be necessary, Matt -- your songs do do it for me! Now write more of them!!!!!
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[email protected] (Michael Davis)
Hello!
I just stumbled upon your website, and I enjoy your Matthew Sweet album reviews. I have one minor correction to the In Reverse review, though. He wasn't going for a Phil Spector wall of sound, but a Brian Wilson wall of sound. Listen to In Reverse and Pet Sounds back to back and you'll see what I mean.
Waiting for the next MS album (waiting, and I want to...)