Rolling Stone
What made Matthew Sweet's last album, Girlfriend (1991), such a treat was that it matched his introspective songs and weepy voice with bursts of extroverted guitar. A Revolver-era mix added ferocity to the musical attack while still allowing Sweet to hang his heart out. At moments a pedal steel would creep in, or Sweet would nail a hook home with a perfect multitracked harmony.
On Altered Beast, guitarists Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine reprise their roles, and ex-Voidoid Ivan Julian adds to an already guitar-heavy mix. High-profile veteran pianist Nicky Hopkins and drummers Mick Fleetwood, Big Star's Jody Stephens and Pete Thomas of the Attractions are also on the scene. Unfortunately, though much of their playing is exciting, the music sounds cramped, the victim of too many overdubs. Rather than pointing up especially emotive moments, Sweet allows the music to swamp him. Only on the spare "Someone to Pull the Trigger," where Sweet advises his lover to "hold me and love me/Tie me up and drug me," does he strip away the garnish and deliver the urgent pop magic of his best work.
In the lyrics he's the same old Sweet. He treats lost love in archromantic terms; heartbreak leads lovers to ponder life's meaning and dwell on death. This worldview is reflected in the music's often somber tone. The album's end piece, "Evergreen," finds Sweet sounding particularly desperate. "All your prayers they brought no answer," he sings. "Your faith was a lie." Frustratingly uneven, Altered Beast has its inspiring moments; the problem is finding them.
The Indianapolis Star, Monday, July 19, 1993
He mixes ingredients for sweet sound
DARK LOOK, BRIGHT SOUND: Matthew Sweet's Altered Beast is a beautiful combination of disparate influences
By Steve Hall, Staff Writer
The artistic and commercial breakthrough Girlfriend sounded like Neil Young, John Lennon and Lou Reed having a jam session inside Matthew Sweet's body. Altered Beast is more of the same - ragged guitars with a crazy horse crunch ("Falling"), Beatlesque harmonies ("Life Without You") and romanticism so pure and sweeetly wistful ("Evergreen") it aches.
The biggest change is lyrically. Girlfriend sounded autobiographical - a lovesick troubador indulged in painful self-revelation. Here, Sweet explores emotions through characters - a wolf in sheep's clothing in the psychedelic "Devil with the Green Eyes," for instance, and a misanthrope who takes privacy to new levels in "Knowing People" ("I don't like people knowing about me").
Backed mostly by his Girlfriend band, including Television guitarist Richard Lloyd, Sweet wears his influences on his sleeve. To wit, "Ugly Truth Rock" is reminiscent of Buffalo Springfield's "Mr.Soul" and, thanks to co-producer Richard Dashut (Rumors), "Time Capsule" wouldn't be out of place on a Fleetwood Mac album. Sweet's genius is bringing such disparate sounds into an unforgettable, hummable whole.
People Weekly
By Ron Givens
Maybe it's coincidence, or maybe it's destiny, but Sweet has a tendency to make, um, sweet music. No matter what this 28-year-old singer-songwriter-multi -instrumentalist does, he cannot disguise the poppy melodies at the heart of his work or the light, ethreal quality of his voice.
But on his third solo album, 1991's Girlfriend, Sweet met sour head-on - and came away a clear winner. With biting guitars, courtesy of new-wave fretmasters Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine, and a recording that seemed straight out of a well-swept garage, Sweet effectively counterbalanced his catchiness. The alternative power-pop of Girlfriend made him an overnight sensation five years after his solo career had begun.
Now, as an encore, Sweet has toughened up even more. Quine and Lloyd are back on Altered Beast, and at times their playing seems about to snap out of control. The mix is dense, with none of the clarity of Girlfriend. And Sweet has written lyrics that are littered with double meanings, vague symbols, unanswerable metaphysical questions. The album, named after a video game that involves changing identities, is tinged with resentment: toward rejecting lovers, the pressure of fame, hard life.
Some of this is a bit much. And yet Sweet connects anyway with a snappy, syncopated melody ("Dinosaur Act"), a gorgeous harmony ("The Ugly Truth"), a plaintive vocal ("Someone to Pull the Trigger"). Even if he constructs songs like mazes - some with no solutions - he makes them fun to explore. Puzzlement has never been so hummable.
Time, August 2 1993, v142, n5, p58(2)
By Guy Garcia
SWEET IRONY: Devil's horns peeking out from a halo of good intentions.
THE BOTTOM LINE: By wedding his winsome melodies to solid rock, Sweet sticks to a winning formula.
All rockers have a touch of the devil in them. Some bare their demons flagrantly, others let their horns peek out from under a halo of good intentions. Matthew Sweet, who likes to mix bad-boy guitar licks with well-mannered melodies, belongs among the latter. As a lyricist, Sweet writes about girls and God with the same confessional zeal, seemingly torn between hardened skepticism and the promise of faith and romantic redemption. Yet despite his doubts - or perhaps because he still cares enough to wonder - Providence has smiled on him.
Three years ago, Sweet was just another unsung songwriter from the Nebraska heartland. His third album, Girlfriend, an eclectic melange of 1960s-style guitars and '90s-style attitude, had been passed over by most of the major labels. Then, the president of Zoo Entertainment, a venturesome Hollywood-based record company, happened to hear Sweet's disc playing in a fellow executive's office. Despite the fact that Zoo had already turned Sweet down once, he was immediately signed to the label, and Girlfriend went on to become an alternative rock hit.
Now, two years later, we have Altered Beast, a 14-song album that features many of the same stellar sidemen who served on Girlfriend (most notably Robert Quine on guitar), as well as Mick Fleetwood and keyboardist Nicky Hopkins. Like its predecessor, the album alternates winsome ballads with bare-knuckled rockers that resurrect and update rock's blustery past with born-again conviction.
Irony abounds. On "Dinosaur Act," Sweet seems to poke fun at his own hippie-era idols, while Quine's wailing riffs and power chords evoke their bombastic guitar-driven sound. The second half of the record opens with an audio clip from the film Caligula, in which the Roman dictator, played by Malcolm McDowell, declares himself a god; then, on the very next track, comes "Ugly Truth Rock," a droll comment on the megalomaniac temptations of stardom.
Sweet's penchant for infusing his lyrics with religious images is evident on "Knowing People," in which he asks, "Are you made like God/ When you start to bleed/ Do you really know/ What it is to breathe?," and on "Evergreen," where he declares, "You started to pray/ But all your prayers they brought no answer/ Your faith was a lie."
At first listen, the love songs sound lighter than the rest of the album, but beneath the sunny surfaces, Sweet's view of secular relationships is equally bleak. The brokenhearted narrator of "Someone to Pull the Trigger" implores his lover to take him back or "shoot." And on the mid-tempo "Devil with the Green Eyes," Sweet laments, "You were never meant to be mine/ 'Cause I came up from a dark world/ And every love I've ever known is dead." At such moments, backed by Quine's corrosive electric guitar, Sweet takes sentiments that could have been morbid or sappy and renders them bracingly bittersweet.
Stereo Review, August 1993, v58, n8, p78(1)
By Parke Puterbaugh
Matthew Sweet has never served his pop songs quite straight up. There's usually been a tincture of dissonance or untidiness around the edges, a nod toward life's realities rather than the never-never land of pop dreamers. On his superb new album, Altered Beast, Sweet smudges his perfect little songs with a sooty smear--squawking guitars here, angry lyrics there--making for an ugly/pretty pastiche that is revealing in its honesty. An unkempt jewel in the rough, the album is suspended halfway between a melodic heaven and a grungy hell, its lack of polish ultimately more absorbing than a batch of sweet Beatlish nothings.
Altered Beast tends more toward the scraggly-sounding, mixed-up confusion of "Divine Intervention" than the piquant pop tunes that kept the track company on Girlfriend, Sweet's 1991 breakthrough album. He sounds measurably more perturbed, saddened, even downright irate here. His usual cast of peerless New York guitarists--Robert Quine, Richard Lloyd, and Ivan Julian--pitches in with prickly leads that serve as musical analogues to Sweet's rancor. In "The Ugly Trath," with Byron Berline's fiddle flying, Sweet concocts a country-rock hoedown filled with such troubling lines as "You don't want to die / But the living gets you down / . . . Ah, you simply cannot hide from the ugly truth." (If you don't get the point the first time, the song's reprised in a clenched-teeth, full-tilt version later in the album.) Many of the songs are written in minor keys, including "Do It Again," in which a pretty melody and chugging rhythm support a cheerless set of lyrics about a couple that take turns hurting each other. The moral of the story is that bad love is better than none at all. This sense of constriction is even more explicit in the next song, "In Too Deep," where the singer's sense of entrapment is conveyed with a series of hellish images. Sound bites from the movie Caligula further contribute to a subtextual aura of dissolution and rabid surrealism.
Near the end, the album seems to take a turn toward the tragic, with intimations of lost loved ones ("Evergreen") and abject despondency ("Falling") clouding the already overcast landscape. In "Falling," Sweet sings, "And every day takes something away / Until there's nothing left to say." Altered Beast is so deeply felt and grippingly confessional that it seems an album made less with an audience in mind than as a means of therapy and expression, and in that context, it is very much in a class with Robyn Hitchcock's Respect, R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People, and Lou Reed's Magic and Loss. No, it is not a power-popper's nirvana this time out. But it sure feels real.
Billboard Magazine, 7/24/93
Sequel to last year"s commercial breakthrough, Girlfriend, is a tougher, but even more dazzling exercise in pop-rock perfection. Again, Sweet benefits from a solid hand of backup players: Guitarists Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine return, and Ivan Julian, Nicky Hopkins, Greg Leisz, Fred Maher, Pete Thomas, and Mick Fleetwood join in. "The Ugly Truth" (heard in rock and countrified versions) is a great leadoff; "Life Without You," "Dinosaur Act," and "In Too Deep" are boldest of the rest. High-quality set should put Sweet over the top at last.
Daily News
Power pop marries dark irony in a real beauty of a 'Beast'
By Jim Farber
Matthew Sweet has just released what may be the catchiest pop record ever made about death. From start to finish, Sweet squawks and muses about literal death, romantic death, emotional death, even death's positive qualities, transformation and rebirth.
No small feat for a power pop record. But Sweet's latest goes a long way toward remodeling that entire genre. From the beginning, power pop's mingling of melody and power chords ranked as the tastiest combination this side of chocolate and peanut butter. Pioneered in the early '70s by acts like Badfinger, the Raspberries and Big Star, power pop lingers today solely in marginally celebrated acts like Crowded House, World Party and Del AAmitri, the culture's last adherents to a Beatle-esque notion of melody.
Yet none of those acts marries pop tunefulness to rock rage with the depth of Sweet. Credit a key part of that to the ruthless skill of Sweet's featured guitarists - Richard Lloyd of Television and Robert Quine of countless New York underground acts.
While the two also joined Sweet on 1989's Earth and his '91 breakthrough LP (Girlfriend), by turning up a third time they read as committed co-conspirators. Together, they do as much for Sweet as Keith Richards does for Mick Jagger, awarding his formal pop tunes a sturdy second voice.
Consistently, Lloyd and Quine inject stinging new melodies into Sweet's lush ones, pushing his passion to ecstasy. While compact and coiled, their solos frequently approach the reach and revelation of the best extended jams.
Lloyd and Quine had equally free reign on Girlfriend, but here the sound surrounding them kicks harder. In contrast to the clarity of the last album, Sweet's latest goes for a harsher, blurrier sound, as devised by producer Richard Dashut. Best known for his work with Lindsey Buckingham (another proud perverter of pop), Dashut proves an ideal ally for Sweet. For one thing, he apparantly encouraged more forceful vocals from the singer, though Sweet's natural boyishness continues to provide ironic contrast to his more bitter observations.
And there's no shortage of bitterness on Altered Beast. While Girlfriend sometimes shone with optimism and wit, here nearly every song hurls ugly accusations or damning admissions. In "Dinosaur Act," the narrator stalks an old lover; in "Knowing People," he throws a paranoid fit, and for "In Too Deep," he casts desire itself as a killer. Love can often seem lethal to Sweet - though not always with wholly negative results. In one of Sweet's more complicated tracks, "Someone to Pull the Trigger," he likens falling in love and losing one's cherished solidarity to a kind of aided suicide j- one he craves as much as he fears.
Still, most tracks play it even darker. When not viewing life as a continual process of decay ("Falling") or fingering love as a lie ("What Do You Know?"), Sweet reminds us all we're going to die ("The Ugly Truth").
Then again, when he reprises that last song, he makes sure to add the point that death gives life urgency. And in the finale, "Evergreen," he even finds a way to conquer death, asserting that a moment savored holds something eternal. Sweet has found a way to conquer time in his music, too. By alluding to '60s classic rock - the Crazy Horse minor chords, the Buffalo Springfield folk-rock - and updating '70s power pop, Sweet collapses walls between eras. Small wonder Altered Beast rates, in the end, as soaring, cranky and timeless.
Details, August 1993
"Singer-songwriter" is a dirty word these days, evoking a total lack of backbeat and general wussiness, but on the evidence of this LP, Matthew Sweet may be able to whip the profession into shape for the '90s: pumped up, guitar-heavy, and addicted to video games.
GQ, August 1993
Forget the singer's surmane - this stuff is gloriously bittersweet, with its ambivilant-to-jaundiced bachelor lyrics and the wondrous guitars of Robert Quine and Richard Lloyd, who dose lines like "Every love I've ever known is dead" with exquisite tension. The sound of Badfinger in a ground war against the Byrds.
Entertainment Weekly, March 18, 1994 n214 p102(1)
By Deborah Frost
With his wry melodies and dry humor, Sweet comes off like the unaltered
son of Lindsey Buckingham and John Hiatt. And goosed by the prickly fretwork
of original alternative guitar hero Richard Lloyd (Television), this mostly
live EP proves that pop can be both "Superdeformed" (as one track
is titled) and super-delightful.
CMJ New Music Magazine
By Douglas Wolk
Let's hear it for the recent-album-revisited quickie. A favorite of musicians who want to come a step closer to fulfilling their contracts, make amends for performances that came out wrong the first time, or simply keep their presence alive in record stores, this kind of release tends to be short, sweet, and easier to swallow than the full-length album it follows up. Matthew Sweet's Altered Beast album didn't do quite as well as Girlfriend, for one reason or another, so now we have Son Of Altered Beast. It's got an outtake from those sessions, a remix of the album's "Devil With Green Eyes," and five live tracks: three versions of songs from the album, plus a pro forma cover of Neil Young's "Don't Cry No Tears" and a new take on "Superdeformed," which has been kicking around Sweet's repertoire for years, most recently as the lead track on the No Alternative compilation. (The title, as Sweet took pains to explain on a recent TV appearance, is from one of his favorite Japanese cartoons.) The result is a surprisingly chewy rock record. Where studio versions of Sweet's songs tend to be stripped-down, slickly engineered pop, the live setting gives a wider berth to his penchant for the grand rock gesture. Check out, for example, the arenafied guitar-slashes through "Knowing People" or the big, crunching run-through of "Someone To Pull The Trigger." Son Of Altered Beast isn't a star attraction, but it's the equivalent of a really good opening act.
CMJ New Music Report
By Jon Wiederhorn
While Son Of Altered Beast is more like a promo CD-5 than a proper EP, it's still an enjoyable release. And for fans with an insatiable Sweet tooth, it's a must-have. The disc features a melancholy remix of "Devil With The Green Eyes," a studio outtake and five live tracks recorded in small clubs, each of which feature ex-dBs drummer Will Rigby. The outtake, "Ultrasuede," is sleek and catchy, with surging guitars and sharp vocal harmonies, but most of the live cuts are markedly more jagged. An exception is "Someone To Pull The Trigger," which is slow and somber, with emotive pedal steel guitar courtesy of Greg Leisz (of k.d. lang's band) and vocals that drip like shed tears. The remaining concert numbers were recorded at Washington DC's tiny but unquestionably hip 9:30 Club, lending them a charged feel. "Superdeformed" opens with a feedback squeal and abounds with abrasive guitar chops; "I Wanted To Tell You" reels with Richard Lloyd's dizzying guitar licks, and a cover of Neil Young's "Don't Cry No Tears" is a reverential homage to one of Sweet's idols.