Customer Reviews

Girlfriend

5 star:		(57)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's hard to believe that it's been ten years since Matthew Sweet unleashed this pop/rock masterpiece.

While Sweet has released some excellent albums in the past decade (and last year's 18-track Time Capsule anthology is a great place to start for the uninitiated), Girlfriend is Sweet's perfect album. It's full of great melodies and pop hooks, and in Richard Lloyd (co-founder of the band Television) and Robert Quine (Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Lou Reed) the album boasts two terrific lead guitarists. Standout tracks like "Girlfriend" and especially "Divine Intervention" are reminiscent of Revolver-era Beatles, only with grittier guitar. But there's more to Sweet than loud guitars. For example, listen to the lovely ballad "Winona" or the achingly beautiful "You Don't Love Me" which both employ the plaintive pedal steel guitar work of Greg Leisz (who has worked extensively with Dave Alvin). And on "Thought I Knew You," Sweet plays lead guitar and sounds a lot like R.E.M.

With a running time of just over sixty minutes and fifteen songs, you'd think there might be some weak tracks, but they are all perfectly crafted power pop delights--all written by Sweet. Thanks to hometown boy Matthew Sweet, Nebraska has contributed something to popular music besides Zager and Evans, who recorded "In the Year 2525" back in 1969. This is a terrific album--and check out the 1950s-era cover shot of Tuesday Weld. [There's another black-and-white shot included in the booklet along with song lyrics.] This album should have propelled Sweet into superstar status--and the title track did go Top 10 on the Modern Rock charts--but in a pop world where boy bands and precocious nymphettes reign supreme, Sweet seems doomed to cult status. There's a void in you music collection if it doesn't include this album. ESSENTIAL

I bought this album the week it came out because I read that it featured extensively one of my all time favorite guitarists, Robert Quine (cf. Richard Hell and the Voidoids or Lou Reed's THE BLUE MASK). And indeed, one of the reasons this album is so extraordinary is Quine's absolutely blistering guitar work (though ex-Television guitarist Richard Lloyd plays lead on the equally blistering "Divine Intervention"), which contrasts magnificently with Sweet's superb songs. Without Quine, however, the songs might be a bit too sweet (bad pun intended), a fault of some of his other albums. But without the great songs, there would be nothing for Quine to play against.

When this album came out, Sweet was a bit of an oddity. He had released a couple of albums that featured nice pop songs and a synthesized drum track, which rendered the songs rather more lifeless than they should have been. On GIRLFRIEND, however, Sweet gets a full live, crack band with some of the best guitarists in the world. As a result, you get a phenomenally successful collaboration between arguably the greatest guitarist to come out of the punk movement and a first rate songwriter. As a fan both of great songwriting and great guitar playing, there are few more thrilling moments in rock for me than songs like "Girlfriend," which opens with an off-the-chart Quine intro, the gorgeous verses that follow, only to segue back into a scorching instrumental break. Does it get any better than this?

Luckily, the great songs just keep on coming all the way to the end of the album. This album is just chuck full of great moments. Check the end of the guitar break at the 2:53 point of "Looking at the Sun," or the tremolo guitar that Lloyd Cole contributes to "Don't Go." Listening to this album again in 2003, it is as if "Holy War" had been written yesterday. The album appropriately ends with the marvelous "Nothing Lasts," featuring only Sweet singing and strumming an acoustic guitar while Quine plays a remarkably subdued electric.

There are so many more things I would love to mention if I had space, like the way Sweet on the album isn't afraid to be a fan of pop idols, as seen in his love song to Winona Ryder (whom he didn't know) or Tuesday Weld (whose photo appears on the album cover) or Madonna (who is thanked in the credits with the words "hey, you never wrote me back"). A great album, and one that has held up magnificently over the decade since it first appeared.

This record was a revelation when it came out, and remains as vibrant and bracing today. It is one of the absolute best power pop records of the 90s, a decade in which that genre experienced something of a renaissance (Posies, Teenage Fanclub, Velvet Crush, Jellyfish etc.)

Sweet had made a couple of unremarkable records before this one. I think two things made it leap out of the CD player and into our collective conscious. One was the sublime twin guitar work of Richard Lloyd (Television) and Robert Quine (NYC downtown guitar hero and notably on some of Lou Reed's most powerful work.) These two guys blaze and smolder throughout these melodic, harmonic songs, providing more bite and panache than most records you will hear in any genre. The performances of Quine and Lloyd in service to Sweet's catchy numbers creates the illusion of two tigers tamed; you can feel the excitement of their ferociousness on every track, even the soft, cotton-candy-sweet "Your Sweet Voice."

The second thing that makes this record stand apart is the fact that it is a break-up record, and a great one. From the optimistic second tune, the infectious "I've Been Waiting," through to the desolate "Nothing Lasts," you can hear Sweet laying bare the gamut of emotions involved in a relationship and its dissolution. Like Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones or Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights-or perhaps most aptly, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours-a good break-up record transcends time and trends and endures.

Every subsequent Mathew Sweet record has a few gems, and some folks will even argue that the follow-up, Dinosaur Act, is the better album. It is a good one, but this is where the Mathew Sweet legend begins and reaches its fullest heights.

I own over five thousand CDs, Tapes and Records. This is my all time absolute favorite. I was in my early twenties when this came out. I don't know how many cracks I put on the steering wheel of my 74 Chevy Nova banging my fists to this album. The title track is great and gets you right into the record. He just plays great down home, grass roots rock and roll. No extra crap. Some of the songs are quite sad like You Dont Love Me and Winona. They could downright make you cry. Thank God for Matthew Sweet, as he tried to singlehandedly save us all from the deeply mired heavy Seattle Sound of the early nineties.

Thank God. I heard Girlfriend, the single, on the radio one day about a year or two ago. That lead to a download and the purchase of the album a few days later.
What seemed impulsive was overpowered by the feeling that a masterpiece had been uncovered. I hate the superlative language thrown around for these sorts of things, but this has proven to be no flight of fancy.
This guy, Matthew Sweet, writes songs that connect. You can feel it.
The twin guitar virtuosos who appear here deserve big credit. Big drive. Big. It sounds great. Gritty and foot stompin'.
And, what a recording.
Near 49 now. Sometimes its raw. Sometimes its ennui. This recording captures both ends.
It also rocks.
randolph wish

Years ago I saw Matthew Sweet open for Robyn Hitchcock. Sweet had just released GIRLFRIEND and was yet to receive much radio or video time. Sparse crowd at The Ritz and this short guy with dirty locks steps up and knocks off "I've Been Waiting" and some other song. By the time he finished the second song there must be 500 women jammed against the stage. I was in a relationship that I really wanted to work probably for all the wrong reasons, and as you could guess it wasn't going anywhere. I was mesmerized by Sweet's hold on his audience and that balance between tough and sexual and vunerable and sensuous. bought the album that night at Tower records. I spent the next month listening to the album every chance I had like it contained the secret code of women that somehow Matthew Sweet knew and I was missing. Eventually broke up with "going nowhere" and met another. After a few weeks of dating I bought her GIRLFRIEND. Leading up to a more intimate night I asked her if she liked the album. She said she understood it. Only problem was the wedding band we hired had no idea who matthew sweet is and refused to learn how to play "Ive been waiting" or "I wanted to tell you". I told them they suck after they suggested they can play the Cure! Few if any albums have ever had such a hold on me. It really is a great album and I would play for any girlfriend and if she doesn't get it move on.

This album is excellent. Matthew Sweet has an amazing ability to write seemingly simple songs and then record and perform them in such a way that they are almost unrecognisable. Many of the songs on this album feature "dueling riffs", that is there are two different lead guitar parts going on through most of the song. This feature can't really be appreciated until you hear it through headphones where the complexity of both parts can be fully appreciated. I've never heard anyone else who can transform simplicity into such intertwining compositions and still maintain that essential pop groove. The only down side to this record is the fact that the bonus tracks don't quite fit the rest of the album, but I'm not complaining, it just makes me want more!

On Girlfriend, Matthew Sweet has gotten pop (with a jagged edge) down pat. `I've Been Waiting' features plenty of sparkling Byrd's jingle-jangle acoustic guitar work. The countrified `Winona' and `Your Sweet Voice' could very well be from the best of the Byrds' Sweetheart Of The Rodeo sessions. And the marvelous vocal harmonies of `Thought I Knew You' are as good as anything by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Sweet doesn't steal guitar lines from what many consider the Founding Fathers Of Power-Pop (Big Star), he simply pays respect. Listening to `Evangeline,' `I Wanted to Tell You,' `Does She Talk,' and `Holy War' is as stirring as revisiting Number One Record. The cover photograph of Tuesday Weld summarizes the lyrics of Girlfriend (and every genuine pop song): Boy meets girl, girl leaves boy, boy sulks. So you've never heard of the Byrds, Big Star, CSN or Tuesday Weld? That's OK. Girlfriend is a commendable introduction.

"Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought -- these are the artist's highest joy."

-- Thomas Mann, "Death In Venice"

The word "transcendent" is one of the most overused adjectives in the rock music critic pantheon. I'd love to avoid it, as I contemplate the greatness of Girlfriend, but it's just too true...I can't help it...

This is a transcendent rock album.

How in the world is this guy not a household name, after this album? Before one gets angry -- angry with the tin-eared music industry, mostly -- one remembers that Van Gogh sold absolutely diddly during his life. Only the passage of time peeled the onion skins from the eyes of the beholders so that they saw the true greatness of the man's work. Eleven years after Girlfriend was released, Matty is thankfully still alive and able to accept the apologies of people like me.

How so? I bought this gem in '92 after hearing "I've Been Waiting" (as perfect a pop tune as I could imagine) on, of all stations, WHFS in Washington, DC -- that bastion of alternative rock. Compared to the other "life sucks, gurls suck" fare of that era (RIP, Kurt), "Waiting" shone like a light in the darkness. And what perfect timing: After 10 years of marriage, I'd finally decided (!) that I really did love my wife and couldn't imagine an existence without her. Still, Girlfriend's plays on my machine were mostly that song -- that song only.

First glimmer: It's 1995 and I'm doing some work over at our townhouse community clubhouse. Decide to put Matty in as some "background music." Soon, five people are around, asking "Who is this? It's great stuff."

Second glimmer: I give the CD a little more airtime in my world and discover that the first four songs ("Divine Intervention", "Waiting", "Girlfriend", and "Looking at the Sun") are about as strong, musically and lyrically, as anything I've heard from the Beatles or Stones or Van or Bob Zimmerman or ANYBODY. And who are these guitarists? Oh, just Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine...maybe in the Top Ten of post-Elvis Stratocaster heroes (Scotty Moore, ya know I love ya). How much better can an album begin than with that weird, addictive "duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh, duddle-a-duh, DING, duh" riff?

Final glimmer: On the road, a month ago, with Girlfriend on and wrestling with our German Shepherd puppy driving up 270. "You Don't Love Me" comes on and all of a sudden, inexplicably, I'm crying as this simple two-verse, one chorus song reveals itself. This guy is cutting his heart in half to give us a look, with a sad/classic pedal-steel in tow, at how it was when his first marriage dissolved. I'm overwhelmed...I am so blessed...my life, my wife...this great music.

Later, I spend a quality evening with the whole CD and finally appreciate all of the colors on its palette...kind of like seeing Vincent's "Starry Night" in toto..."Your Sweet Voice" and "Nothing Lasts" are just outstanding...

Matthew Sweet has apparently submitted his resignation on the musical career. A loss for us, but probably very good timing. From what I've read, he sees a bigger picture than Rolling Stone or MTV or People Mag...God bless him for that. No needles or razor blades or shotguns for Matty. Just a concise, brilliant body of work, with Girlfriend as the Hope Diamond.

Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend" is easilly the best album of his career and one of the best pop rock albums of the 1990's. Sweet combines strong guitar lines, often bittersweet lyrics and some amazing hook laden songwriting to construct his gem. The best songs are the title track, "Divine Inspiration," "I've Been Waiting," "Evangelinie," and "I Wanted to Tell You." The album only drawback is that at fifteen tracks it contains just a bit too much filler material. Otherwise, its about as good as pop rock gets.