Matthew Sweet

Girlfriend

A rock masterpiece that gets better with age

Review Score:

(10/10)
I bought this album the week it came out because I read that it featured extensively one of my all time favorite guitarists, Robert Quine (cf. Richard Hell and the Voidoids or Lou Reed's THE BLUE MASK). And indeed, one of the reasons this album is so extraordinary is Quine's absolutely blistering guitar work (though ex-Television guitarist Richard Lloyd plays lead on the equally blistering "Divine Intervention"), which contrasts magnificently with Sweet's superb songs. Without Quine, however, the songs might be a bit too sweet (bad pun intended), a fault of some of his other albums. But without the great songs, there would be nothing for Quine to play against.

When this album came out, Sweet was a bit of an oddity. He had released a couple of albums that featured nice pop songs and a synthesized drum track, which rendered the songs rather more lifeless than they should have been. On GIRLFRIEND, however, Sweet gets a full live, crack band with some of the best guitarists in the world. As a result, you get a phenomenally successful collaboration between arguably the greatest guitarist to come out of the punk movement and a first rate songwriter. As a fan both of great songwriting and great guitar playing, there are few more thrilling moments in rock for me than songs like "Girlfriend," which opens with an off-the-chart Quine intro, the gorgeous verses that follow, only to segue back into a scorching instrumental break. Does it get any better than this?

Luckily, the great songs just keep on coming all the way to the end of the album. This album is just chuck full of great moments. Check the end of the guitar break at the 2:53 point of "Looking at the Sun," or the tremolo guitar that Lloyd Cole contributes to "Don't Go." Listening to this album again in 2003, it is as if "Holy War" had been written yesterday. The album appropriately ends with the marvelous "Nothing Lasts," featuring only Sweet singing and strumming an acoustic guitar while Quine plays a remarkably subdued electric.

There are so many more things I would love to mention if I had space, like the way Sweet on the album isn't afraid to be a fan of pop idols, as seen in his love song to Winona Ryder (whom he didn't know) or Tuesday Weld (whose photo appears on the album cover) or Madonna (who is thanked in the credits with the words "hey, you never wrote me back"). A great album, and one that has held up magnificently over the decade since it first appeared.

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