Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I take a look at Altered Beast, Matthew Sweet's 1993 follow-up to his breakthrough album.
The music business is a mysterious and unpredictable thing. Many artists have recorded brilliant albums that go underappreciated while the dumbest shit imaginable totally blows up. This is about one of those underappreciated albums.
Matthew Sweet got his start in Nebraska, playing in the bands the Specs and the Dialtones while still in high school. He went to college in Athens, Georgia, as that city's music scene was hitting its stride. Sweet had met R.E.M. when they played in Lincoln, Nebraska, the previous year; he teamed up with Michael Stipe in a duo called Community Trolls and played guitar in Oh-OK, a band fronted by Stipe's sister Linda. He also formed The Buzz of Delight with Oh-OK drummer David Pierce and released an EP in 1984, which led to Sweet scoring a solo deal with Columbia Records.
His first two albums, 1986's Inside and 1989's Earth, received positive reviews but didn't sell well. By the end of the '90s, his label was done with him and his marriage ended. Sweet signed with Zoo Entertainment in 1990 and he put together a powerhouse band featuring indie guitar gods Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine. The resulting album was 1991's Girlfriend, a power pop masterpiece that broke through on FM radio and MTV with the title track (which hit #10 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart). While the album only hit #100 on the Billboard 200 chart, Sweet got a lot of attention in the indie rock world and was poised for bigger things.
But by July 1993, when Sweet's fourth album Altered Beast was released, a lot had changed in the rock world. Grunge was king and music fans were chasing after the latest big thing, which was guitar-dominated heavy rock from the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Sweet's super-melodic power pop wasn't in demand, but Altered Beast also had a darker edge to it that turned some fans of Girlfriend off. It was still catchy as hell, but there was a lot more anger and intensity to songs like "Devil with the Green Eyes," "Someone to Pull the Trigger," "Knowing People" and "The Ugly Truth." The grunge acts had plenty of that darkness as well, but for whatever reason, Altered Beast didn't catch on with the public as much.
It's too bad, because it's an impressive record. Sweet brought back Lloyd and Quine to provide hot lead guitar on several songs but also recruited a who's who of killer musicians: guitarists Ivan Julian and Greg Leisz, Nicky Hopkins on piano and drummers Rick Menck, Pete Thomas, Jody Stephens, Fred Maher and Mick Fleetwood (producer Richard Dashut worked on several huge Fleetwood Mac albums).
The album's title came from the videogame Altered Beast, and Sweet told Spin magazine that it referred to "whatever is inside you that someday might explode, and maybe you don't know it's there."
I became a Matthew Sweet fan after hearing "Divine Intervention" from the Girlfriend album, so I was looking forward to Altered Beast. And while I was at first disappointed that it wasn't Girlfriend 2, it only took a few listens to realize this was something different and excellent. It didn't hurt that the album's release coincided with the similarly dark turn my life had taken; I was 25, recently out of a long-term relationship, renting a room in a house in a town I didn't know and working crazy hours (5 a.m. to 1 p.m.). I was depressed and this depressing album really spoke to me.
You know Sweet was dealing with some serious shit when he put not one, but two clips from the X-rated movie Caligula on the album. The musical scope of the album was all over the place, from stinging rockers like "Dinosaur Act," "Ugly Truth Rock" and "Knowing People" to hooky pop-rock like "Time Capsule," "Life Without You" and "Do It Again" to country-rock gems like "What Do You Know?" and "The Ugly Truth" to searing guitar rippers like "Falling" and "In Too Deep." It's a rewarding collection that it took some folks decades to appreciate.
Strangely enough, Altered Beast charted higher than Girlfriend, hitting #75 on the Billboard 200, but it didn't have near the cultural impact of its predecessor. In 1994, Sweet released Son of Altered Beast, an EP featuring live and alternate versions of Sweet songs, plus a live cover of Neil Young's "Don't Cry No Tears."
In 1995, Sweet returned with the more upbeat album 100% Fun (although the title came from Kurt Cobain's suicide note), which featured the hit "Sick of Myself." In the subsequent 30 years, he's released nine more studio albums as well as covers albums with Susanna Hoffs and an acoustic album as part of The Thorns with Pete Droge and Shawn Mullins. His latest album was 2021's Catspaw. Sweet was touring in Canada with the band Hanson last fall when he suffered a serious stroke; a GoFundMe helped raise enough money to fly him home with a medical crew and to a rehabilitation hospital. To date, nearly $570,000 has been crowdfunded to help Sweet as he relearns how to perform basic tasks again. It's unclear whether he'll ever be able to play music again, but here's hoping. He's one of the underrated greats.
