Someone to Pull the Trigger – Matthew Sweet

Matthew Sweet’s devotion to his song structures and chord sequences – should the solo come before or after the middle eight? What’s the perfect secondary dominant chord to enliven the verse progression? – sometimes sounds like the work of a guy desperately using craft to keep darkness at bay.

While this tendency is present on Girlfriend, it becomes more marked on the follow-up, 1993’s Altered Beast. Sweet named the record after the late 1980s arcade game instantly familiar to kids of that era (like me!) as the game that was bundled with the first version of the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive as it was known outside the US) until the world-conquering success of Sonic the Hedgehog gave Sega a plausible rival to Mario and Luigi at last. The game – both laughably basic and in its final level infuriatingly difficult. Damn boxing goat warriors – sees you playing as a Greek warrior resurrected by Zeus to rescue the kidnapped Athena (quite why a goddess needs a mortal’s help is not explained. Because patriarchy, I guess). Sweet picked the title because, in his words, “you have to find these little power-up things, and when you eat them you become the Altered Beast, this other creature that’s really powerful and violent.”

So it’s a record about carrying the capacity for darkness inside you – how we cover it up and how it manifests itself anyway. Musically, it’s all over the map compared to Girlfriend, the heavier and more fuzzed-out 100% Fun and the Beach Boys-ish late 1990s duo, Blue Sky on Mars and In Reverse. Sweet tapped producer Richard Dashut, a veteran of Fleetwood Mac’s classic albums, as well as a troupe of musicians from the 1960s and ’70s: Mick Fleetwood, Pete Thomas (Elvis Costello) and Big Star’s Jody Stephens, who play drums on a track or two each; Byron Berline, who’d played with the Byrds and the Band, who plays fiddle on the country-rock Time Capsule, and the great Greg Leisz, who’s played with just about everyone, on pedal steel. This intriguingly multi-generational band was completed by Sweet’s three regular lead guitarists, Ivan Julian, Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine, all veterans of late 1970s punk bands, all cast for their virtuosity and their ability to subvert Sweet’s classicism with sheer squalling noise when the moment demands.

Lyrically, the songs are frequently despairing, with the album’s prettiest song being the darkest. I’ve tried constructing readings of Someone to Pull the Trigger where the song isn’t simply a plea for someone to put the singer out of his misery (in which pulling the trigger is a way of saying “commit to doing something”), but ultimately the text doesn’t support them, and neither does Sweet’s vocal performance. He sounds lost, devoid of hope.

This song and the gorgeous Reaching Out, with Fleetwood on peerless form on drums, are the album’s sad, desperate heart. The more I listen to Sweet’s music, the more I hear the darkness below the Beatlesque chord changes, sunny harmonies and the goofy pop-culture references (in 2020, a record called Altered Beast may as well be called Pong). The clarity, as Sweet puts it, is chilling.

My Life is Right – Big Star

There are two ways to approach the music of Big Star these days. The first is through the rock-canon myth of the Unruly Genius of Alex Chilton, Big Star’s singer-songwriter. In that case, start with their third album Third (also known as Sister Lovers), released in 1975, and work back. This is the standard rock-critic take on the record:

To listen to it is to be plunged into a maelstrom of conflicting emotions. Songs are drenched in strings and sweet sentiment one minute, starkly played and downcast the next. No pop song has ever bottomed out more than Holocaust, an anguished plaint sung at a snail’s pace over discordant slide-guitar fragments and moaning cello.

Parke Putterbaugh, Rolling Stone

Here’s my take on Third. It’s a mess, and only a couple of songs reach the standards of the band’s best work. The myth of Alex Chilton the Unruly Genius is just that, a myth: in the early years of Big Star at least, Chilton was a disciplined craftsman, but that was an image he didn’t care to project (and besides, that image doesn’t appeal to jaded music critics). But it was Chilton the craftsman who gave us the Ballad of El Goodo, Give Me Another Chance, Thirteen and Watch the Sunrise, all of which are absolute classics of their type. Songs like Ballad of El Goodo don’t happen without work. A lot of it.

Which brings us to the other way to approach them: through the first album, #1 Record, from 1972. This is the one that the Posies, Teenage Fanclub, Matthew Sweet, the Bangles and Elliott Smith owed so much to. This is the one that first made cool the idea of mixing 1965-era Beatles-style songwriting with big drums and guitars that were jangly, but loud, with an edge to them, guitars so sparkly they’re almost harsh. This version of Big Star were responsible for the lion’s share of the band’s enduring songs.

This version of Big Star had two singer-songwriters, and it was the push and pull between Chilton and Chris Bell, author of My Life is Right, that made #1 Record such a fine record. Without Bell to bounce off and to provide nearly half the songs, Chilton struggled to pull together enough strong material for a whole album. Bell shared Chilton’s Beatles obsession, but was a more damaged, less hedonistic, individual. Depressed by the commercial failure of #1 Record, dependent on heroin and, it has often been said, conflicted about his sexuality, he seemed destined for a bad end.

He met it, at the wheel of a Triumph TR-7.

He cut a classic single after leaving Big Star (I Am the Cosmos/You and Your Sister), which is  known to later generations though This Mortal Coil’s cover of the B-side (with vocals by Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly) and the inumerable covers of I Am the Cosmos. But not enough people talk about how great his contributions to #1 Record are: his vocal on Don’t Lie to Me is the album’s most startlingly aggressive moment; Try Again is a beautiful, weary song, beaten down but ready to start over, refusing to give in; My Life is Right is his most joyful song, and maybe the band’s. There’s nothing more grin-inducing than Chilton and Bell straining to hit their high notes on the line “You are my day” in the chorus while drummer Jody Stephens plays bubbling triplet fills on his snare and rack toms. And what a great drummer Stephens is – I could write a book!

I can’t recommend #1 Record highly enough. Radio City and Third/Sister Lovers certainly have their moments, but for me they’re the work of another, inferior, band. The first version of the group were less mythic, but a lot more consistently rewarding.

Alex Chilton, Chris Bell