In Brief

* * 1/2 Matthew Sweet, “Altered Beast,” Zoo. Sweet has lately refined one of the niftiest amalgams in rock--part Beatles hookiness and stereo separation, part Neil Young guitar grunge--and the hard pop is still effective here. But on this follow-up to his much-superior breakthrough “Girlfriend,” Sweet too often settles for careless songwriting cliches. Only on “Someone to Pull the Trigger” does content truly measure up to swell form. New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).