Matthew Sweet

Girlfriend

turn it up. sing along. wish you were matthew sweet.

Review Score:

(10/10)
This album, along with one other, define for me the early '90s. Hearing either of them--and they're very different records--instantly brings back that time. (Of course, many songs can do that--Journey brings back the early 80s, fer instance, if not with great fondness--so I suppose this argument doesn't prove much. But I tend to think that, more often than not, music that pulls us into nostalgic reverie does so because we liked it when we first heard it, and we like it now. So: I liked this then. I like it now. A lot.)
The other record is Primal Scream's "Screamadelica." Both are seminal, both necessary. In "Girlfriend," Matthew Sweet emerged from the relative murk of his first couple of recordings (marred more by their production than by his writing) as a preternaturally talented pop hookster. What a record this is! (Why didn't it hit number one? Same as "Screamadelica": Because commercial radio is run by money-grubbing morons. And the public is stupid enough to lap it up. Fools we are--THIS is what we should be listening to.) But I don't want to sully this review by drifting into pointless criticism of commercial radio. What I want to say is that these are great songs, intelligent and crafty and performed with zeal and heart by Sweet and an enviable cabal of cohorts, including Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine. What more could you want? I mean, what more is there?

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