Matthew Sweet Gets a Taste of Success : Pop music: ‘Girlfriend,’ the singer-songwriter’s latest album, was passed over repeatedly but now has won wide acclaim. He plays the Palace tonight.

After years of sub-cult obscurity, singer-songwriter Matthew Sweet is enjoying a whiff of the sweet smell of success these days.

Sweet’s “Girlfriend” album, his third, was just named one of the year’s 10 best in the Village Voice’s annual critics’ poll. It’s sold into six figures, thanks largely to a revved-up title song that made it to No. 2 on the alternative-rock airplay charts.

Not bad for a project that was rejected by his former record company.

A year and a half ago, a major reorganization at A&M; Records left Sweet unsupervised during the completion of “Girlfriend,” so he was able to finish it the way he wanted, with a decidedly raw sound. The bad news: The new regime at the label didn’t much care for what it heard, and dropped him.

“I thought it would never come out,” Sweet, 27, said in a phone interview from Boulder, Colo. “It was really just a fluke.” (He’s been traveling with Robyn Hitchcock on a tour that comes to the Palace tonight.)

As he tried to shop the tape to other companies, even his current label, Zoo, initially passed.

The unreleased tape became a popular bootleg in industry circles--including with the hired help. “The president of Zoo heard it playing in someone’s office and then changed his mind after having passed on it. If that hadn’t happened that day, I don’t think it would have come out at all,” Sweet said.

The chart success of “Girlfriend” is ironic, given that of his three albums, it’s the one that sounds least radio-ready. Former studio tech-head Sweet went for a live feel on the tracks, emphasizing the sizzling guitars of Richard Lloyd (of Television fame) and Robert Quine, even leaving some of the mistakes in--”much to the initial chagrin of the players,” he said joking.

Commonly cited touchstones for the record’s catchy, crunchy, ‘70s-reminiscent sound: the Beatles, Big Star, Sweet’s musical hero Gram Parsons (whose influence is evident in Greg Leisz’s pedal steel playing as well as the personal lyrics), and especially Neil Young & Crazy Horse.

“Oftentimes people bring up Lenny Kravitz to me,” said the New Jersey-based Sweet, clearly unimpressed. “I think there’s a big difference in that he is really striving to re-create a certain environment, whereas all I wanted to do was get a feel as good as records used to have. It wasn’t a law that we couldn’t have any reverb--it just sounded good that way, and once we’d done a few songs like that, it made sense to stick with it.”

A comparison that probably hasn’t been made yet--but well could be--is Rosannec Cash. Like her “Interiors” album, which sprung out of her failing marriage, the riveting, intimate bulk of “Girlfriend” would seem on the surface to perhaps reflect the pain of Sweet’s 1990 divorce in songs like “You Don’t Love Me,” “Thought I Knew You” and “Nothing Lasts.”

Like Cash, Sweet tries to downplay autobiographical implications.

“Early on, people said, ‘Wow, it’s so harrowing. How can you stand doing these songs?’ And even now I get people who ask me, ‘Since this was your big breakup record, will you still be able to write songs?’

“But I always wrote songs that were melancholy and about deterioration, and then songs that were happier or more positive. I just think that with the way I recorded this record, they come across so much more directly and intensely that people get that feeling.

“The whole autobiographical nature of it has been overblown in the press. . . . I get horrified when I think people are sitting around thinking of my record as The Big Divorce Record. I don’t want to capitalize on my or anyone else’s pain as some way for me to benefit.

“But I guess it’s better that people think about it as some kind of personal thing than if they were talking about my Mohawk or something instead.

“Do I sound like I’m making excuses?”