Billboard, Feb 22, 1997 v109 n8 p15(2)
By Steven Mirkin
In 1991, Matthew Sweet appeared to be on the cusp of a career that combined critical and commercial success with Girlfriend. But neither of the two albums that followed, 1993's Altered Beast (an album that Sweet admits was a "kind of anti-Girlfriend") and 1995's Brendan O'Brien-produced 100% Fun, have matched it in sales or reviews.
With the March 25 release of Blue Sky On Mars, Zoo/Volcano Records hopes to launch Sweet's career into a new orbit. "Our approach with this record is to take Matthew to another level," says Zoo GM Jeff Dodes. "If Blue Sky doesn't top Girlfriend, it certainly is his best record since then," The recently independent label (following a split with BMG, which continues now to only distribute the label) expects to match Sweet"s achievement with what Dodes characterizes as a creative and energetic marketing plan.
"We're owned by a new company, and that is reflected in our philosophy. We've gone from [being] a small major label owned by a major company that released a lot of records, to a music- and marketing-focused company."
As if to prove Dodes' point, Sweet is on the road, playing clubs and giving audiences a taste of his new material. In addition, more than a half-million stickers featuring the record's title and release date are being distributed at clubs, concert halls, and various lifestyle events, such as ski and snowboard demonstrations, where you would expect to find Sweet fans. To buttress the campaign, the label has bought advertising in the March issues of 15-20 music and lifestyle magazines.
The setup campaign will unfold in stages. In keeping with the album's space-age title (named for a tour mentioned in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Recall), NASA paintings of a Mars exploration craft grace advance CDs, postcards, posters, and ads. As the album's street date approaches, the campaign will shift to the album's cover art - photos taken by spacecraft - as well as unveiling Sweet's new Roger Dean-designed logo.
This attenuated setup is also in place at radio and retail. Zoo's promotion staff and VP of marketing Mark Flaherty have already been on the road, visiting outlets and accounts to expose them to the album. "We're going to visit every station at the appropriate formats and play them 'Where You Get Love' before its Feb. 24 add date," Dodes says. Before that, radio was serviced with a promotional disc highlighting the most successful single from each of Sweet's last three albums, "Girlfriend," "Devil With Green Eyes," and "Sick Of Myself," which Zoo hopes will not only reintroduce programmers to Sweet, but convince them to put the songs into recurrent airplay.
College stations will be serviced with a college radio-only 10-inch picture disc, which has two album tracks and three B-sides. The disc is being serviced in advance of commercial radio. "We just want to cater to that base, give them something special and something early so that they will not feel this is already something of a hit, and they had nothing to do with it," Dodes says.
At commercial radio, Dodes says, the label will initially concentrate on triple-A, alternative, and active and album-oriented rock stations. Dodes says that a plan to cross the album to top 40 is in the works, but that it will not happen until the album has established itself at Sweet's base.
Early response - both at radio and retail - has given the label an optimistic outlook. The label increased the first shipment of albums to 200,000 from 150,000 units. Dodes says that this wouldn't have been possible without Sweet delivering a strong album, but takes some credit for prodding the creative process.
"I was looking for a way to make the songwriting process different. Girlfriend," he says, "was written due to specific, difficult circumstances in Matthew's life, and you wouldn't want to re-create them." Rather than disrupting Sweet's personal life, Dodes and Russell Carter, Sweet's manager, decided to build a studio in Sweet's home and let the writing and recording process take its course. While Blue Sky was eventually produced by O'Brien in an outside studio, a few of the home recordings made it onto the album.
The homegrown nature of the demos is reflected in the fact that Sweet plays all the guitars on the album, eschewing the contributions of Richard Lloyd, Robert Quine, and Ivan Julian, all of whom have played on past albums. "I really was reaching to find a way that the record would be different," Sweet says. "I love the way Ivan and Richard and [Robert] play, but I always knew that one day I'd do an album without a bunch of guitar players on it, and I though that well, I'll just take the leap on it. In a way, it forced me to make a little, simple record - to rely less on the guitars to carry it. The way the record turned out, it seems like the record I imagined I could make, especially with Brendan. I always imagined I could make a little more modern and streamlined pop album."
Dodes says that Zoo will also be looking into ways to streamline Sweet's profile on TV and the concert stage. The label hopes to book Sweet onto "Saturday Night Live" this season, as well as having him return to The Tonight Show and Late Show With David Letterman. A video for "Where You Get Love" has been directed by Andy Fleming (The Craft, Threesome).
Sweet will be touring for the next year, and Dodes hopes to hone his image. "It's tough for male singer/songwriters to make an impression - especially with females." That's partially, he says, because in the past, "there hasn't been an effort to make Matthew a star. That's what people want." But Dodes is wary of "trying to turn him into something he's not. We won't remake him into George Michael . . . what we're trying to do is take his positives and elevate them to another level."
by Lee Ashendorf, News-Letter Staff
Two new Zoo Entertainment releases are coming out; one by the familiar Matthew Sweet, and the other by unknown Lusk. These albums not only share a label, but their titles have a striking resemblance (Blue Sky On Mars is Sweet's, Free Mars is Lusk's.
Blue Sky on Mars
Returning for another round is Matthew Sweet, with his new release, Blue Sky On Mars. Just out this week, the album brings us back in time a little. Sweet's previous release, 100% Fun, had a poppy alternative sound all its own. Blue Sky On Mars, on the other hand, provides a variety of attractive, yet already-familiar, sounds. Right from the first track, "Come to California," which sounds amazingly Beach Boys-like. Sweet plays us familiar sounds that are so hard to place that they seem completely original.
After the opening few bars, "Until You Break" has the slow, thoughtful riffs that are somewhat reminiscent of Extreme's "More than Words." On the other end of the spectrum is the song that follows it on the album, "Over It," a short song with a quick and upbeat sound. It has what are arguably the most thoughtful lyrics from any of the songs on this album: "I won't ask you what you think of me/'Cause I'm exactly who I want to be."
"Behind the Smile" and "Heaven and Earth" are both worthy songs with a catchy melodic line and memorable guitar and drum riffs. These have a much cooler sound than "Where You Get Love," Sweet's first single to be released from this album.
As for the lyrics, well, Sweet has never really been known for his lyrics. Some of them are thought-provoking, others are simply there. The music makes up for it, though. Take all the different classic Sweet styles, imagine them on one album, throw in some pseudo-eighties sounds, and you've got yourself Blue Sky on Mars.
Free Mars
When compared with Blue Sky, Free Mars has a surprisingly similar sound, overall. Unfortunately, it doesn't attract the listener as well as Sweet does. Lusk's uniqueness seems to depend on the fact that its electric guitar stands out more than most similar bands. Lusk's singers sound like Paul McCartney wannabes. For some reason, the Benedictine monks come to mind more easily than Paul McCartney.
To their credit, though, only Lusk could come up with a song title like "Savvy Kangaroos." Unfortunately, the song switches from minor to major and back again too frequently; the listener gets so confused by the switch in keys, and therefore moods, that it becomes difficult to concentrate on the music itself. The song's most distinguishing characteristic seems to be the slides from one note to another within a word, somehow losing the listener somewhere along the way.
At least Lusk has some noticeable lyrics, once you can actually separate the lyrics from the muddled music. In "Gold," they declare, "Death deserves my window/I can't wait." More noticeable than Sweet's, at least.
The title song is the best on the album, and, not surprisingly, contains the least musical confusion. The lyrics throughout the song are contradictory, in an interesting way: "All of us will always be right here with you/You'll never reach the sun." Also recommended off this album is "Kill the King." The only salvation for this song is that it's more alternative, with less of an attempt to sound New Age.
And guess what Lusk does: they throw in a hidden track. Actually, it's listed as track twelve, but there is no track twelve. Blair's Spiders is an annoying, scratchy song with little musical tracking thrown onto the album about nineteen minutes into track eleven. I guess they figured, if it worked for Nirvana....
The music at the beginnings of most of the songs suggests that the image they're looking for is smoke and mist all over the room. If this is the case, however, the middles of these same songs does not maintain this image. This adds to the confusion of the entire album; just like any good story, a song should know what its ending will be from the beginning. Lusk's songs don't give that impression of foreknowledge. They seem too random from beginning to end.
If you're planning to buy a new album from Zoo, and you're looking for musical quality and variety, stick with the tried and true Matthew Sweet. Lusk needs to come out of its state of confusion.
Billboard, April 19, 1997 v109 n16 p81(1)
By Gina Van Der Vliet
Multimedia company Internet Music Marketing Inc. (IMM) is developing ambitious new World Wide Web sites for several established acts, including Depeche Mode, ZZ Top, Blessid Union Of Souls, and Matthew Sweet - all of which are due to launch in the next few months.
The company has drawn acclaim for its 1996 Counting Crows site (http://www.countingcrows.com), which was recently awarded best official artist/band-produced site of the year by Unfurled, an annual Web popularity poll conducted by the co-branded MTV/Yahoo! Web site.
In addition, the New York-based IMM is working on a newly revamped Web site for Geffen Records and a new label site for Volcano Entertainment.
IMM is headed by Ken Krasner, a former RCA director of artist development who started his own Web development company shortly after he built a Web site for RCA act 1000 Mona Lisas in 1995, which included the first opportunity for Web users to purchase an entire major-label album for sale on the Web before its actual release date to retail (Billboard, Jan. 20, 1996).
Krasner, who is also executive producer of the artist-themed Web sites, has developed sites for Republica (http://www.republica.com), Skold (http://www.skold.com), and the Verve Pipe (http://www.thevervepipe.com). The latter was selected by Netscape for use in an online demonstration of the audio capabilities of Navigator 3.0. The site was also featured prominently in a series of high-profile television commercials from Intel touting the multimedia capabilities of its Pentium chip.
The unique spin IMM puts on its artist sites - amid a growing amount of competition from young and hungry Web developers - is to establish content that strengthens the online relationship between artists and fans.
"The most important thing to remember is that [the sites] are about the relationship between the artist and the fans," Krasner says. "We simply facilitate the communication."
Unique content is also a key to establishing a strong Web site, says Krasner.
Unreleased tracks, demo tapes, or rare live performances are an example of such elements, in addition to the obligatory chat rooms, tour information, song lyrics, and pictures, as well as audioclips and videoclips.
At many of the sites IMM has developed, Web surfers can also win tickets to live shows, after which their E-mail reactions are posted on the Web.
The next IMM-developed site to debut is for Reprise act Depeche Mode (http://www.depechemode.com), which is due between April 27 and 30 to coincide with the release of the act's forthcoming Ultra. Visitors can check the under-construction site for more information on the exact launch date and possible events tied in with the launch.
The ZZ Top site (http://www.zztop.com), due in the coming months, will place users behind the wheel of a car traveling on an ongoing road trip. Each month, the site will contain a different stop throughout America and around the world. The site promotes the band's 1996 RCA album Rhyth-meen but will also feature music from some of ZZ Top's catalog releases.
Sonicnet, January 20, 1997
Sweet played nearly all the instruments on his upcoming album
By Gil Kaufman, Addicted to Noise Staff Writer
Matthew Sweet will touch down with a new album on Mar. 25. Titled Blue Sky on Mars, the 12 song collection was co-produced by Sweet and Brendan O'Brien (Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, STP) and recorded at O'Brien's studio in Atlanta last Oct.
The album features peerless pop prince Sweet playing virtually every instrument and note on it, a la' The Artist himself. With the exception of some keyboard and drums by O'Brien and some drumming by sideman Rick Menck, Sweet wrote, played and sang all lead and backing vocals all over the record, whose first single will be "Where You Get Love."
The video for the song will be directed by Andy Fleming (The Craft) and Sweet will start a 20-date mini-club tour on January 25th at Albuquerque, NM's Dingo Bar before launching a full-on tour in Mar.
The vinyl release will pre-date the CD by two weeks and the first 3,000 copies will be personally autographed by Sweet. If the album cover, a NASA photo of the 1976 Viking 1 probe landing on Mars looks familiar, that's because it's, um, the actual photo of the Viking 1 landing on Mars in 1976. Get it? Other song titles on the album are: "Come to California," "Back to You," "Hollow," "Behind the Smile," "Until You Break," "Over It," "Heaven and Earth," "All over My Head," "Into Your Drug," "Make Believe" and "Missing Time."
SonicNet, September 2, 1997
By Chris Nelson reports, Addicted To Noise Staff Writer
When the four-CD box set re-release of the Beach Boys' classic and highly influential Pet Sounds finally hits stores in November, pop songwriter Matthew Sweet will undoubtedly be among those anxious to flip through the tracks.
Afterall, the alternative rocker owes at least some of his harmony-heavy and melodic rock sound to Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson and his knack for penning the perfect pop tune. In fact, Sweet counts Pet Sounds and Wilson among the finest gifts the pop world has to offer.
"On pure melody, he was the best. The music is really moving even without any words. The instrumentals on the record killed me. And I think the combination of the innocence and openness of his lyrics, the childlike thing. It maybe hurts them in the realm of being really cool, but at the same time it's a really important element of what makes it all great."
When the 1997 year-end retrospectives are compiled, likely to sit high atop many "Best Of" lists is the four-CD box set re-release of the Beach Boys' influential Pet Sounds album (Nov. 4), which has experienced a series of delays in production.
Release of the collection -- featuring the album's original mono mix, the first-ever true stereo mix, outtakes, and vocal- and instrumental-only mixes -- has been postponed on several occasions. It was last slated for release in the summer of '96 before being bumped yet again due to missed deadlines from both the band and Capitol Records, as well as fear, according to label sources, of overcrowding stores already saturated with the Beatles Anthology series.
Among the Beach Boys fans most eager to get their hands on the set are many notable musicians themselves.
"I just really loved... "In My Room" and "Caroline, No" and Pet Sounds. I love that shit. I'm a sucker for it," Everclear leader Art Alexakis said. "I liked it when I was a kid. That's what I liked about the Ramones. They had a lot of that Beach Boys thing. With the power pop going and the harmonies. I dug that shit and I dig it now."
And it's no wonder.
Although Pet Sounds was considered a relative disappointment for the band when it was initially released in 1966, it was hailed by musical peers such as the Beatles' songwriter Paul McCartney as Beach Boy Brian Wilson's magnum opus. In fact, McCartney, whose reflections on Pet Sounds are included in the box set's 120 page liner notes book, cited the album as a key influence at the time for the Fab Four's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, widely considered one of the best rock albums ever made.
Now anticipation is running high among a new generation of influential musicians for the Pet Sounds box.
Sweet (Girlfriend, 100% Fun), for one, said he was particularly disappointed when the collection was shelved. A Los Angeles resident whose latest LP Blue Sky On Mars clearly demonstrates Wilson's influence on Sweet's sense of harmony and melody, said he had been asked to do a few alternative radio broadcasts with the Beach Boys' leader, on which the pair would team up on one of the Pet Sounds tunes.
"It got to the point where it was like, 'You're going to Brian's Monday and rehearsing,'" Sweet recalled. "And then the next thing I knew it was indefinitely postponed and I never knew if it would really see the light of day or not."
Lush popster Eric Matthews is another fan ready for the Pet Sounds box to bow.
He and McCartney were two of the musicians originally tapped for advertising comments when the box was being prepared last year. Matthews (It's Heavy In Here) is one of the countless fans who marveled while comparing Pet Sounds to such important work as the Beatles' Revolver or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
"They were achieving many of the same things, but Brian's work was a little more special, a little more important. Because he was really doing it all on his own, and the Beatles had so much help. They supplied great songs, but it was George Martin that put them in the Pet Sounds category."
Matthews said that to this day, he continues to turn back to Pet Sounds more than any other album. "There are elements of mystery and imagination in Brian's work when he's great. I don't listen to Beatles records anymore, but for some reason I do need the constant nourishment of Brian's work."
And while he's looking forwad to hearing the box set, Alexakis has his reservations. "I'm kinda depressed by a lot of the stuff that happened after that record. I don't know about the outtakes, but have you heard the Smiley Smile stuff," he asked, referring to Wilson's follow-up Smile sessions, "where he's singing about vegetable sand stuff? It's sad. He lost his mind. The guy lost his mind."
Alternative Press, December 1998
By David Daley
Matthew Sweet had the perfect pop pedigree - a Midwestern Big Star fanatic who corresponded with Michael Stipe and Mitch Easter as a teenager, then moved to Athens, Georgia, the day after his high-school graduation to join Stipe's younger sister in Oh-Ok. Still, when Sweet snared his major-lavel contract as a solo act, his synth-drinven first two records sounded dated even upon their release. With Girlfriend, however, Sweet hit a stride he's rarely missed since. Inspired by a tumultuous marriage and a flood that cost Sweet his house, Girlfriend has smarts, pop craft and hooks to spare, and features the inspired playing of guitarists Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine. Sunshiny songs like "I've Been Waiting" and "Evangeline," as well as the plaintive "Winona" and the darker "Divine Inspiration" sound as warm and real as the R.E.M., Game Theory and Let's Active records that originally inspired Sweet.