Review: Matthew Sweet's 'Girlfriend' Vinyl Reissue on Intervention Records

The threshold between the last gasps of hair metal and the grunge revolution, 1991 saw a record not so easy to categorize as Mane Attraction or Nevermind. While Matthew Sweet was very much a rock and roll artist, his music existed states away from metal or grunge. 

Review: 'Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture'

In the late seventies, The B-52’s magnetized the pop world’s attention to Athens, Georgia, where a new scene was starting to coalesce. There was no particular Athens sound. The-B-52’s kitschy retro party rock was nothing like Pylons angular avant-funk or Bar-B-Q Killer’s chaotic punk or Vic Chesnutt’s gritty songcraft or R.E.M.’s jangly Nuevo folk rock. But the fact that so much varied creativity was blossoming in a particular location was noteworthy and highly influential. That creativity expanded beyond pop as students and artists attracted to a bohemian oasis in the conservative state invented new ways to express themselves and hang out. They got inventive on the cheap with weird food-oriented art shows or made spectacles of themselves while people watching. Outside artists such as Matthew Sweet were drawn to the Athens to catch some of its magic.

Review: Vinyl Reissue of Matthew Sweet's 'Altered Beast'

When critics fell over themselves to praise Matthew Sweet’s breakthrough, Girlfriend, they tended to focus on the music’s sweetness: the glimmering jangle of his overdubbed guitars, the comforting retro-ness of his Beatles and Byrds references, the classic concision of his songs, the lushness of Fred Maher’s production. So when Sweet followed that big hit with the deliberately messy and acidic Altered Beast, a lot of the critics were baffled. Perhaps they hadn’t been listening close enough to the underlying nastiness of Girlfriend tracks such as “Thought I Knew You”, “Does She Talk?”, and “Holy War”. If they had been, Altered Beast would have seemed like a more logical progression as Sweet builds on the bitterness of such songs with production to match. Yes, Richard Dashut is best known as Fleetwood Mac’s smash-era producer, but Sweet didn’t hire Dashut for his pristine work on Rumours. Sweet was more interested in channeling the sloppy derangement of Tusk, and just as Tusk was more fascinating and challenging than Rumours, Altered Beast is—in this reviewer’s perhaps unpopular opinion—a similar improvement over Girlfriend. 

The polish flakes away as rusty guitars roar, well-deep drums bash, and Sweet sneers and spits. “Dinosaur Act”, “Devil with the Green Eyes”, “Ugly Truth Rock”, “In Too Deep”, and especially “Knowing People” are straight-up mean, and their loathing feels more authentic than the mass of Sweet’s grungier contemporaries because of his pop rep. It sounds like he was willing to burn down his critical good will for the sake of getting something toxic off his chest. He did make room for some of the more soothing pop styles of Girlfriend, though “Life without You”, “Time Capsule”, “What Do You Know?”, and “Someone to Pull the Trigger” do not skimp on the despair. So while the production sounds messy, the vision is actually quite focused, and for my money, Altered Beast is Matthew Sweet’s underappreciated peak.

Intervention Records’ 100% analog audiophile edition of Altered Beast—the second release in its trilogy of Sweet reissues—doesn’t clean up that messy sound; it just presents its with startling clarity, authenticity, and sonic might. Guitars are remarkably present whether grinding out on “Dinosaur Act”, shimmering on “Time Capsule”, or booming from a bottomless pit on “In Too Deep”. Details reveal themselves. Until now I’d never really noticed that weird percussive touch on “Someone to Pull the Trigger” that sounds like Sweet brushing his teeth.

Intervention’s vinyl is presented as a double album with bonus tracks on Side Four, which shifts the natural side divider—that goofy audio clip from Caligula—to the middle of Side Two (an even weirder Caligula clip hidden at the end of the original CD edition is left out entirely). Bonus tracks are stronger than those on Intervention’s recent edition of 100% Fun. They include what may be Sweet’s best non-LP tracks—the corrosive “Superdeformed” from the No Alternative compilation—and all B-sides from the “Ugly Truth” and “Time Capsule” singles (though not the “Devil with the Green Eyes” single), as well as “Bovine Connection” from the extended Japanese edition of Son of Altered Beast. The American edition of that E.P. will presumably be the next installment of Intervention’s Matthew Sweet vinyl campaign, which remains the vinyl reissue campaign to beat in 2018.

Review: Vinyl Reissue of Matthew Sweet's '100% Fun'

Even though he made the albums that defined him during the CD age, Matthew Sweet still went the analog route in the studio. While this may not have been the most practical form of music making in the nineties, it is very faithful to the vintage vibe that Sweet’s best music radiates. 

Girlfriend, the first of Sweet’s classic triad, still tends to get most of the love, but in my estimation, the two albums that followed deserve equal plaudits: the gnarly Altered Beast and 100% Fun, which sits in the zone between Girlfriend’s pristine jingle-jangle and Altered Beast’s mid-fi roar. More concise than either, 100% Fun arrived the latest but it may ultimately prove to be the best entry point into Matthew Sweet fandom. So it makes some sense that 100% Fun is the first entry in Intervention Records’ reissue campaign that will see all three of Sweet’s essentials reissued on vinyl in audiophile quality and with bonus tracks. 

So along with the fundamental joy of hearing great songs such as the head banging “Sick of Myself”, the sadly sunny “We’re the Same”, the Revolver homage “Lost My Mind”, “Get Older”, “Walk Out”, and the rest, there’s the exceptional audio quality that brings out every nuance of the album’s warm, grungy timbers without any surplus, unintended grit. On their website, Intervention Records boldly declares that even attempting to compare their 100% analog edition of 100% Fun to the brittle, two-dimensional CD from 1995 amounts to “a total farce,” and it ain’t no idle boast.

The seven bonus tracks are included on their own LP as a sort of 12-inch E.P., but Intervention makes the most of the format by having the disc spin at an audiophile-friendly 45 rpms. The songs are good, though only the B-sides “Never Said Goodbye” and “You” are excellent enough to have been contenders for the main attraction. It would have been nice if there had been some annotation indicating the sources of these bonus tracks… I had to perform a bit of internet research to find out which ones were B-sides and which ones were outtakes. Hardcore completists may also lament the absence of a couple of demos that were included on the “We’re the Same” single but are missing here. Still those quibbles are totally minor when the sound, packaging, and music are so unquestionably fab. Keep it up with Altered Beast and Girlfriend, Intervention, and you may have the reissue campaign of the year.