Rock-'N'-Roll Animal

By Guy Garcia

PERFORMER: MATTHEW SWEET

ALBUM: ALTERED BEAST

LABEL: ZOO

THE BOTTOM LINE: By wedding his winsome melodies to solid rock, Sweet sticks to a winning formula.

All rockers have a touch of the devil in them. Some bare their demons flagrantly, others let their horns peek out from under a halo of good intentions. Matthew Sweet, who likes to mix bad-boy guitar licks with well- mannered melodies, belongs among the latter. As a lyricist, Sweet writes about girls and God with the same confessional zeal, seemingly torn between hardened skepticism and the promise of faith and romantic redemption. Yet despite his doubts -- or perhaps because he still cares enough to wonder -- Providence has smiled on him.

Three years ago, Sweet was just another unsung songwriter from the Nebraska heartland. His third album, Girlfriend, an eclectic melange of 1960s-style guitars and '90s-style attitude, had been passed over by most of the major labels. Then, the president of Zoo Entertainment, a venturesome Hollywood- based record company, happened to hear Sweet's disc playing in a fellow executive's office. Despite the fact that Zoo had already turned Sweet down once, he was immediately signed to the label, and Girlfriend went on to become an alternative rock hit.

Now, two years later, we have Altered Beast, a 14-song album that features many of the same stellar sidemen who served on Girlfriend (most notably Robert Quine on guitar), as well as Mick Fleetwood and keyboardist Nicky Hopkins. Like its predecessor, the album alternates winsome ballads with bare-knuckled rockers that resurrect and update rock's blustery past with born-again conviction.

Irony abounds. On Dinosaur Act, Sweet seems to poke fun at his own hippie- era idols, while Quine's wailing riffs and power chords evoke their bombastic guitar-driven sound. The second half of the record opens with an audio clip from the film Caligula, in which the Roman dictator, played by Malcolm McDowell, declares himself a god; then, on the very next track, comes Ugly Truth Rock, a droll comment on the megalomaniac temptations of stardom.

Sweet's penchant for infusing his lyrics with religious images is evident on Knowing People, in which he asks, "Are you made like God/ When you start to bleed/ Do you really know/ What it is to breathe?," and on Evergreen, where he declares, "You started to pray/ But all your prayers they brought no answer/ Your faith was a lie."

At first listen, the love songs sound lighter than the rest of the album, but beneath the sunny surfaces, Sweet's view of secular relationships is equally bleak. The brokenhearted narrator of Someone to Pull the Trigger implores his lover to take him back or "shoot." And on the mid-tempo Devil with the Green Eyes, Sweet laments, "You were never meant to be mine/ 'Cause I came up from a dark world/ And every love I've ever known is dead." At such moments, backed by Quine's corrosive electric guitar, Sweet takes sentiments that could have been morbid or sappy and renders them bracingly bittersweet.