Matthew Sweet: Time Capsule - Best Of 90-00

(Zomba)

Herald rating: * * * *

Review: Russell Baillie

As the hefty volume profiling 600 significant albums The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion (see review I7) points out, 1991 sure was a good one for great records.

This was the year of Nirvana's Nevermind, Massive Attack's Blue Lines, U2's Achtung Baby, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend ... sorry who?

No, the American pop-rocker's humdinger of an album, didn't exactly set the world alight. But it got me off to a good start reviewing records in this newspaper.

And Girlfriend still gets played frequently and loudly back at my place, it having started a lasting affection for Sweet verging on the slavishly devotional.

Even got to see him and his band play a club in foreign parts last year (he's scared of flying so is unlikely ever to tour here) and this best-of is basically his live set - the best parts of Girlfriend and the five or so albums that followed all the way up to 1999's In Reverse.

If, like most of the world, Sweet has passed you by, then consider what might have happened if R.E.M. had taken their blueprint from the Beach Boys rather than the Byrds. And cross that with guitars that are both clean and mean and suggest what might happen if New York art-rockers Television had tried playing country songs.

But Sweet's most distinctive attribute is his adenoidal, crystalline voice, which some probably find whiny and which frequently comes in harmonies stacked to the ceiling.

Sweet's delivery makes his songs glow with a bruised vulnerability and an acerbic wit.

That's whether in songs that rock as hard as they pop (Girlfriend, Divine Intervention), deliver barbed views on falling in love (Sick of Myself), get heartsick complete with pedal steel (Someone to Pull The Trigger) or head towards Beach Boys symphonic pop (If Time Permits).

Time Capsule shows Sweet's decade of power-pop is as elegant as ever.

And membership to his cult following is still highly recommended.