Matthew Sweet, Girlfriend
Featured Album
A latter-day landmark of power pop and askew guitar
"I don't know where I'm gonna live/I don't know if I'll find a place," Matthew Sweet begins this latter-day landmark of power pop and askew guitar. Sweet had a right to wonder: after a stint in the legendary Athens, GA, twee-poppers Oh-OK, he'd issued two solo flops and barely seemed to be anywhere. Then his girlfriend dumped him. So Sweet got mad — and began writing the album of his career. Girlfriend is about relationships alone, and while Sweet isn't saying anything particularly new about them here, his reedy, anxious voice and the sparkling, tangled six-string work from ex-Voidoid Robert Quine and ex-Television man Richard Lloyd — joining pedal steel player Greg Leisz, fellow singer-songwriter and rhythm man Lloyd Cole, and Sweet himself — say everything we need to understand about the tangled matters at hand.
Time has made it easier to hear what makes Girlfriend so utterly of the early-CD era: an opener with a false ending ("Divine Intervention," one of the most attention-grabbing opening guitar riffs of any rock album), fake needle skips at the end of "Evangeline" (the cassette version stretched them across about 12 minutes at the end of side one), 60 minutes where 50 or 40 would have done the job even better. But any album with stuff as joyous as the disarmingly intimate "I've Been Waiting" ("Secret on your lips/That nobody knows/Gentle in your eyes/You can wear my clothes") or "Evangeline" (a power pop man writes an ode to an anime girl — too perfect), or the genuinely pained "Thought I Knew You," transcends its era through sheer velocity.
