By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
March 23, 1992
There is a heartache in Matthew Sweet’s voice that pegs him as a romantic who knows both the euphoria of being in love and the pain of breaking up. On his first Chicago gig as a headliner, Sweet performed a tantalizing midnight show Saturday at the Cabaret Metro where he and his tight backup band channeled his wisely ambiguous lyrics with playful abandon, letting the audience know that though he may have been beaten up emotionally, he’s not a whiner.
The 90-minute sold-out concert went by all too quickly, as Sweet and Co. took the audience through a musical timeline that spanned the best of rock ‘n’ roll. The power crunch guitars on his current breakthrough album “Girlfriend” may scream out ’90s, but his sweet melodies and voice pay homage to some of pop’s best purveyors, including the Beatles and Big Star.
Sweet has a conversational vocal style that draws listeners in, whether he’s singing the adoring “Winona” (which he did not write for the actress Winona Ryder) or his pseudo-religious, quasi-protest song, “Holy War.” which he introduced as “sort of about war.” On “Girlfriend,” Sweet sang all the vocals and backup himself. Live, he shared those chores with his band, which couldn’t recreate the fragile harmonizing, but substituted with virility.
When I saw him open for Chris Isaak in Washington, D.C., three years ago, Sweet was doing an acoustic thing that, oddly enough, didn’t flatter either his material or his achingly plaintive man-child voice. There is a bite to Sweet’s music that is enhanced by an electric guitar band. His current line-up includes guitarist Ivan Julian (of the Voidoids), whose sinewy leads succinctly complemented Sweet’s rhythms.
In his six-song encore, Sweet proved he’s an original who isn’t afraid of his past, culling two-thirds of his material from Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, Merle Haggard and the Beatles. Sweet is a performer whose potential hasn’t been fully realized yet.
