Some masters of melody don’t care about public opinion, and some alternative rockers are way too cool to admit that they’d like to have a hit. This has never been true of Matthew Sweet. Of all the heroes in the guitar-pop canon, he is undoubtedly the least arrogant. Before his commercial and critical breakthrough, he recorded two albums that were completely beholden to period production. His sets lead with sharp, punchy, compressed tracks designed to be radio singles. When popular music got grungy, he turned up the distortion too; when power pop made an unlikely commercial comeback, he gleefully got his Raspberries on. It’s not that he’s a follower or a joiner. He’s just happy to play ball.
That attunement to popular demand was on display at White Eagle Hall (337 Newark Ave.) on Friday Night. Matthew Sweet and his four-piece backing band gave a packed house exactly what they’d come for: material from his heyday. Of the seventeen songs he played in his ninety minute set, thirteen were recorded between 1991 and 1995.
The Lincoln, Nebraska rocker has no shortage of subsequent material. Since the trio of sets he’s best known for — the depressive but sugar-fixed 100% Fun, the stormy, belligerent Altered Beast, and the sublime, heartbroken Girlfriend — Sweet has recorded no fewer than ten studio albums. You wouldn’t have known it. Instead of airing the news stuff (one track from Catspaw, his fine 2021 album, did make the encore set), he tore through his back catalog with the dedication of the legacy act that he really isn’t.
At its best, the show was a reminder that few pop-rockers can turn a tune with Sweet’s skill. The tracks from Girlfriend have resonated for thirty years for a very good reason: they’re very sturdy compositions about a very shaky relationship. “You Don’t Love Me,” a ballad from the set, zeroes in on the precise moment when its narrator realizes that a romance is doomed. At White Eagle Hall, Sweet demonstrated that the song has lost none of its immediacy, its frankness, or its observational accuracy. “I’ve Been Waiting,” an ecstatic exercise in jangle pop and a minor hit, nails the rush of infatuation. On a wave of excitement and a swell of pure romance, Sweet and his band let it carry them toward the end of the show.
Yet Matthew Sweet’s peek in the rear-view mirror is not without obstruction. The artist faces a unique challenge, and one that probably isn’t surmountable. At the sessions for those three sets he revisited at White Eagle Hall, he was assisted by two legendary New York City punk rock guitarists: Richard Lloyd of Television and the late Robert Quine of the Voidoids and Lou Reed’s band.
Sweet would make outstanding music after their departure from his band. Blue Sky On Mars, the first set he cut without his acclaimed sidemen, is ridiculously underrated. But the tension between Sweet’s pure vocal intonation and careful craft and the haywire leads of the guitar players generated drama, incongruity and a feeling of heightened stakes. It was as if the frontman was wrestling with primal forces for control of his own narratives. At White Eagle Hall, John Moremen of the outstanding Northern Californian indie pop band The Orange Peels, channeled the Quine-Lloyd tone and even reconstructed some of their solos. But the feeling of uncontrollability and danger — the feral presence on the loose in Sweet’s garden — couldn’t be recaptured, and probably can never be.
Musical director, support vocalist, and acoustic guitarist Adrian Carter compensated for this by sidestepping Downtown grime and connecting Matthew Sweet with his deep classic rock roots. “Winona,” a song about a celebrity obsession; slipped into a ‘70s Stones-y groove; “Devil With the Green Eyes” became barbed, minor-key, mid-period R.E.M.; the Fleetwood Mac country-rock underpinnings of “Time Capsule” and the muscular Cheap Trick-siness of “We’re the Same” were emphasized by the rhythm section of Paul Chastain of the Velvet Crush and Debbi Peterson of the Bangles.
All of these musicians are power pop lifers. They approached the songs from Girlfriend with the combination of reverence and effrontery due to an undisputed landmark of the style. They tried to render the material as it once sounded and is expected to sound by dedicated fans; when Sweet, 59, couldn’t quite get up to some of the high notes of his youth, Carter and Peterson were always there to catch him with harmonies of their own. This was Matthew Sweet as a torchbearer, and a link in a chain made of golden choruses, stretching back through Big Star to the White Album and the Kinks, and forward through Fountains of Wayne, Sloan, White Reaper, and The Lemon Twigs (who come to White Eagle Hall on May 4).
Funny, then, that many of the highlights of Friday night’s show came from more recent albums — even as he nodded enthusiastically toward the past. The chiming guitars and layered harmonies “Byrdgirl,” from 2008’s Sunshine Lies, sounded exactly as the name of the song implied it would. “If Time Permits,” from the ambitious, mildly psychedelic In Reverse, exposed the feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and missed chances that have always been present in Sweet’s writing; the singer said he wished he could have played it for Brian Wilson, who surely would have appreciated it. Then there was the terrific, propulsive “Pretty Please,” which could have fit right in on 100% Fun with no dissonance. Matthew Sweet has never stopped writing songs like this, and surely never will. Even as the intersections between his trajectory and the mainstream have dwindled, he keeps shooting for the Top of the Pops, leading with his faith in the mass audience and the magic of melody.
Yet as carriers of tradition go, Matthew Sweet is a bit of an oddball. He’s always been inspired by anime, comic books, weird tales, and old media; Altered Beast is named after a terrible arcade game. After the rest of the band had left the stage at the end of “Evangeline,” he turned his back to the crowd and twisted the dials on his effects pedals for a few minutes, found a suitably hellacious setting, and left it that way until he was called back for an encore. Perhaps to give his drummer a breather, he told a long and rambling story about the design on his kick drum head that included digressions about tattoos, horror movies, financial advice from his manager, and his bronze cat statuettes. The crowd, unplugged from the current of songcraft, got a little restless. All was forgiven the moment Sweet began to play the riff to “Divine Intervention.” But in rock music, forgiveness is rarely the point — and a little restlessness can be awfully salutary.
Opener Abe Partridge, a raw, witty country-folk singer from Mobile, Alabama, told us that an active brain was the devil’s plaything. Pointedly, he kept his brain engaged throughout his set, cracking wise about hippies, Jesus, United States military inventions, Albert Einstein, Nashville careerism, and a range of other subjects that fitted into his unnervingly steady crosshairs. Adrian Carter added fiddle (and a little necessary sweetening) to wordy composition that, in tone, ideology, and skewed humor, evoked memories of Terry Allen, Mojo Nixon, and other homespun philosophers and Dixie cut-ups. Defeatist for sure, but hard not to root for anyway.