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...BOTTOM LINE: By wedding his winsome melodies to solid rock, Sweet sticks to a winning formula...
PERFORMER: MATTHEW SWEET...
...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...
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...
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...