Published on Dec 2, 1997
Matthew Sweet is the guy you know got beat up after school in
his teens. He probably never went to prom either and definitely
wasn’t the jock hero type. But as a pop icon of the late eighties
and nineties, I’d say he’s getting his just desserts.
Sweet’s strengths as a songwriter rely heavily on his dejected
persona which is consumed by love and all its pitfalls coupled with
an acerbic wit and some awesome guitar hooks.
Girlfriend, his 1991 release, features not only some of
Sweet’s best songwriting , but guest performances by killer
guitarist Richard Lloyd, former post-punk guitar god of Television,
and Lloyd Cole, another great popster from the UK, who put out some
incredible records over the last decade. Lloyd and Cole’s
appearances seem appropriate given Matthew Sweet’s affinity for
LOUD pop music, at turns sweet and powerful. The inside jacket even
advises listeners “don’t be afraid to play it loud.” Good advice,
Matthew.
Sweet also employs two drummers on this record which works with
moderate success. Ric Menck appears on several cuts, who played
around my college town of Champaign-Urbana with several pop bands
and later on the East Coast, and also the talented Fred Maher.
While I always liked Menck’s scrappy, boppy style which works great
on “Looking at the Sun” and “I’ve Been Waiting”, the more solid
rockers like “Evangeline”, based on First Comic’s Evangeline, and
“I Wanted to Tell You”, benefit from Maher’s more sturdy and steady
backbeat.
Themes of love, betrayal and premature parting are interwoven
with Sweet’s appealing, boyish vocals throughout
Girlfriend . I’ve always enjoyed his rather plaintive vocal
style because there is so much other cool stuff going on
instrumentally on his records that a stronger, gutsier vocal style
would only detract from the music. “Girlfriend” is a great top 40
song, though it only enjoyed mediocre success on college/indie
radio upon the album’s release. But my favorite pop tune on the
album is “I’ve Been Waiting” which mixes Sweet’s naturally light
vocals with his and Lloyd’s snaking guitar work. Also noteworthy is
Sweet’s bass work on this tune and especially on “Evangeline” and
“I Wanted to Tell You”. Other than as a songwriter, I think his
strengths as a bass player are largely ignored. My fav bass lines
always set the right punctuation mark in a song, a musical comma or
exclamation mark so to speak.
While I’m not one to snub the great pop tunes on this record,
and I’d put “I’ve Been Waiting”, “Evangeline” and “Girlfriend” up
against some of my favorites, it’s the slower ballads that really
appeal to me on this record. For some reason, and my friends don’t
call me sentimental, the pleading of “Your Sweet Voice” never fails
to choke me up. As the narrator begs his companion to speak to him
in her sweet voice, he nevertheless is quite aware that this is “as
close as I get to love” . The title of “You Don’t Love Me” says it
all while our hero cries “you don’t love me/you can’t see how I
matter in this world.” OK, so even I can enjoy a depressing pop
star once in awhile too, OK?
Clearly, our man is not in the habit of happy love affairs, much
less a self-satisfied ego. Adding to this are the interwoven
religious overtones throughout the record. I don’t think this
detracts from the record, but only supports Sweet’s questioning of
love, life and perhaps God’s existence in a song like “Holy War”
where Sweet complains “Cause I’m not in for killing another man,/
defending my holy land/as if there’s a God who would understand.”
Oh happy days. Perhaps the album’s dedication to the “memory of
Barbara Douglas” coupled with the bust-up of Sweet’s marriage at
the time helped set the somewhat dour mood within some of his songs
on
Girlfriend.
I think another thing I find so appealing about Matthew Sweet is
his true love for all things related to the sixties. The guitars,
the song themes, even the affinity to his childhood memories like
comic books and TV stars, is something some of us, ahem, “aging”
baby boomers can relate to without feeling totally unhip. So the
cast of today’s trendy television shows may have brought back the
bad seventies fashion and all its inherent crap, but let’s face it:
the sixties had cooler TV, cooler fashion (which is why designers
recycle it, oh, every 3 years or so), and definitely cooler music.
If you’re gonna like retro, at least make it during the cool
decade, kids!
From the cover photo of Tuesday Weld and the inherent 60’s pop
feel of this record, there is a hopeful note within Sweet’s music.
That hope for a better place and time was a driving force behind
the counterculture movement of the sixties and may be why Sweet has
so successfully made a good record with
Girlfriend as his musical stance is so firmly embedded in
that era. I only hope that his dreams become realized and make for
a really happy record sometime in the not so distant future.