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CONCERT REVIEW: Matthew Sweet @ World Café Live at The Queen 10/28
While David Dye was celebrating the 20th anniversary of radio show Friday night with sets by John Hiatt and the Indigo Girls at the World Café's Philadelphia flagship, over at the Wilmington outpost, a different 20th anniversary was being marked.
CONCERT REVIEW: Matthew Sweet @ World Café Live at The Queen 10/28
While David Dye was celebrating the 20th anniversary of radio show Friday night with sets by John Hiatt and the Indigo Girls at the World Café’s Philadelphia flagship, over at the Wilmington outpost, a different 20th anniversary was being marked. Even though Matthew Sweet’s latest album, Modern Art, came out at the end of September, his biggest success remains 1991’s Girlfriend, and so his current tour finds him revisiting it every night.
The songs stand up, and the mostly 40-ish crowd was intimately familiar with its 15 tales of romantic woe and yearning. Though Sweet acknowledged after the title track — only three songs in — that the record’s frontloaded with hits, some of the best (“Evangeline,” “Holy War”) were yet to come.
Sweet’s voice is as boyish as it ever was, so while he’s a much bigger man at 47 than he was when he was creeping up on 30, he’s still convincingly winsome on songs like “I’ve Been Waiting” and “Thought I Knew You.” The only musical drawback was that the frontman and his band — lead guitarist Dennis Taylor and drummer Ric Menck, who also play on Modern Art, and Menck’s old Velvet Crush partner Paul Chastain on bass — played almost every song as hard rock, and too many heavy solos sometimes overpowered the pop. Holding back on “Your Sweet Voice” was a nice touch, and a trick they could have employed more often.
Sweet, who broke multiple strings while resurrecting the record, kept the audience informed of the band’s progress, noting when they were through with Side A and when they were ready to begin plowing through the three tracks tacked onto the CD after what was intended to be the closer. After “Nothing Lasts,” they moved onto the anthemic “Sick of Myself,” the first song from 100% Fun; Sweet thought it’d be a more rousing way to end the set, and he was right.
It would’ve been nice to hear a few songs from Modern Art; “When Love Lets Go I’m Falling” would’ve fit thematically, and some of the more psychedelic material would benefit from the band’s live overdrive. And at some tour stops Sweet’s thrown the jangly “She Walks the Night” and a couple of older songs into the encore. But amid The Queen’s many charms — a beautiful space, great sound, effective stage lighting and a decent menu — there’s one problem for those coming from Philly. By the time Sweet came back on stage with about 15 minutes to curfew, you could leave with enough time to walk to the station or risk missing the last train of the night and be stuck in Wilmington until morning. It was a good show, but not that good.
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