Review: Matthew Sweet Show at City Winery

Meg bought tickets for us to see Matthew Sweet for my birthday. 

In the back of my mind I was thinking, poor Mr Sweet.  He has a whole new album of material and all of us will just be there to hear a few brief glimpses of his seminal 1992 'Girlfriend'.

Meg scanned the lineup after we bought our tickets and announced, "Don't get your hopes up, he's not playing his new album."
Oh? What's he doing, covers?
"It says Matthew Sweet will be playing his LP 'Girlfriend'.  In it's entirety. Is that okay?" 

"Um, yes; Girlf5riend is one of the 100 greatest rock LPs ever!"    Yipeee!

We showed up early and stayed late.  Meg noted I was apparently the fifth most enthusiastic patron in the whole audience.

Aside from the opening song, a languid, loping version of  Divine Intervention,  everything moved at an accelerated pace. 

Live I could see that the bass parts on the album are more demanding than I ever realized.  And the drum parts were boring and simple.  

After the first three songs Sweet warned "We're going into the deep cuts now."  His track by track running commentary noted that the original CD has a sound effect of a needle dropping onto an LP at the midpoint to connote the sound of an old vinyl record being flipped over for Side 2. 
"Here's the part where on the original CD we have a needle-in-the-groove sound effect, so imagine that and then we can play the next song."

None of the songs were played in any kind of stretched out  extend-o jam -- that's a good thing.

Sweet encored with Time Capsule and, finally, the very last song of the night, the only material post 2000: She Walks the Night from his current release.   Other than that, two songs from 100% Fun were the only non-Girlfriend Tracks.

The merchandise table had a nice $20 gray t-shirt that was just the album cover art from Girlfriend. 

I didn't know GF had an anti-war song.  Matthew said he wrote it at a time when nobody could have predicted that things were about to get much worse as far as the US jumping into wars cavalierly.  Under his breath he coughed "ahem...Bush!"

I didn't exactly catch the band members' names perfectly.  It sounded like  Paul Chagae was on the bass, Dennis Taylor on guitar (was he a Surf Punk?) and Rick Mink, consigned to the very boring drum parts.  With all the soloing on those songs it ould have sounded bad to have more musical solos.

I very much felt I got my money's worth.  

 

Comments

[Peter]

"The fifth most enthusiastic patron." Meg must really take in her surroundings!