POP MUSIC REVIEW : Matthew Sweet Performance Lives Up to His Name

Though it came belatedly and perhaps even grudgingly, Matthew Sweet did eventually make the obligatory bow to pure-pop’s Romantic imperative Saturday night at the Coach House.

That imperative dictates that love, or at least the open-hearted quest for it, must be held to matter above all else.

For most of the show, however, “phooey on all that” seemed to be the unstated theme of Sweet’s dark, heftily rocking hour on stage. And that was all to the good.

The Nebraska-raised, New York-based singer is a capable pop-rock craftsman who escaped the underground and found some commercial daylight with his semi-hit 1991 album, “Girlfriend.” It’s an album mainly of plaintive reflections on how much breaking up hurts, and how losing in love can make one yearn all the more for new romance.

An appealing record, but not nearly as fiercely romantic and full-on anguished about love’s hurts as the first two albums by Big Star, the ‘70s band that, with its combination of Byrds and British Invader influences, served as one of Sweet’s prime models on “Girlfriend.”

With “Altered Beast,” his recent follow-up to “Girlfriend,” Sweet remembered that there often is an intermediary step between the time when you have a big romance blow up in your face and the time when you’re game for another try. That’s the time when you’re miserable. The album portrays wounded characters who doubt themselves, who can’t stand other people, and who seem ready to do unto others what’s been done to them.

Thus, taking “Girlfriend” and “Altered Beast” as bookends that complement and comment upon each other, you get a nice, rounded picture of the romantic sweepstakes.

In keeping with its subject matter, Sweet is more given to roar on “Altered Beast.” That’s what came out in concert, as he played nine songs from the new album and just four from “Girlfriend.” With his reedy, somewhat thin voice, Sweet isn’t ideally suited for roaring, but his phrasing and lower-register singing had enough bite to get the madder messages across. What’s more, Sweet had brought along the perfect beast to help him with his roaring: Richard Lloyd, one of the most fiery and dynamic rock guitarists alive. Lloyd’s trademark flurrying runs and dissonant fretboard groans and shrieks were just the thing for getting across the torments and tantrums of love’s losers.

One of the strengths of Sweet’s studio work is his knack for creating good layered harmonies out of his own multi-tracked voice. There was a risk that this dimension would be lost in concert. But bassist Tony Marsico provided enough high harmony support to keep Sweet’s voice from sounding bare, and Lloyd, a wonderfully balanced player, had a knack for springing to his aid with supporting melodies during the choruses.

On verses, Lloyd often kept up a raging, jagged commentary, dropping his bristling, often noisy licks between Sweet’s vocal phrases. But he could leap in an instant to cushion the singer with melodious playing.

As the show went on, Lloyd moved from Hendrix-like wailing on the opening “Dinosaur Act,” to thick, countrified twanging on “Evangeline,” to numerous examples (“Ugly Truth Rock” was a particular burner) of the accelerating runs that he made his mark with in the great ‘70s guitar band, Television. Fans of blazing, highly emotional guitar work mixed with good pop craft can find a real treat if they hunt up Lloyd’s terrific 1980s solo albums, “Field of Fire” and the live “Real Time.”

Supporting Sweet (whom he has also backed in the studio), Lloyd played with so much focus and intensity that you’d have thought it was his own show. And, for stretches there, it almost was (Sweet wasn’t the most dynamic stage presence, saying little, moving less, and relying, justifiably as it turned out, on the music to carry the concert).

In case Lloyd’s leads and Sweet’s own slashing rhythm chording weren’t enough guitar firepower, Greg Leisz, another member of Sweet’s studio team, turned up to lend a hand on pedal steel for segments of the show. But the former Orange County resident, now a high-profile session player and a regular member of k.d. lang’s band, was buried in the mix most of the time. One exception was “Reaching Out,” a ballad in which Leisz’s pedal steel painted a high-lonesome backdrop to Sweet’s plaintive, tentatively hoping vocal.

Sweet made sure to dash those tentative hopes and yearning sentiments by following “Reaching Out” with a couple of stormy, angry numbers: “Devil With the Green Eyes” and “Knowing People”--the first full of loathing of self, the second nodding vigorous assent to Sartre’s dictum that “hell is other people.”

Then came the set-closing “Girlfriend,” a zippy pop ode to boys-and-girls-together that was Sweet’s breakthrough hit. Only this time Sweet spat most of his lyrics instead of singing them brightly, while Lloyd put an aggravated exclamation point on the song with a knife-like jab of his fretting hand down the length of the guitar neck.

You got the feeling that the prospective girlfriend Sweet was coming on to in the song had best decline the invitation: This wasn’t the song of a true romantic looking to assuage his loneliness and hurt with new love, but of a beast altered for the worse by love and looking to wreak some emotional mayhem.

It wasn’t until the encore that Sweet set aside cynicism about love and bowed to Romanticism.

“I’ve Been Waiting” chimed and jangled sweetly, and the singer sounded as earnest about love as a supplicating Romeo. A concluding garage-rock bash through the Troggs oldie, “I Want You,” affirmed both the strength of erotic need and the joys of rocking out. In the end, Sweet seemed to be suggesting, the beast who roars his anger can thereby be altered into a person fit once more for the quest for love.

*

The second-billed Jayhawks, from Minneapolis, played a disappointing set.

There wasn’t anything original about their rehashing of the countrified side of Neil Young & Crazy Horse, and that thickly distorted but lyrical guitar style that is Young’s trademark is getting copied so much that it’s getting old, even in the hands of a capable mimic like the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris. When the band quoted at length from Young’s “Down by the River” during an instrumental break, it was merely overstating the obvious.

Karen Groteberg’s rolling, stately piano playing lent a good added dimension as she echoed the style of Nicky Hopkins, the standard-setting ‘60s session player who contributed to the Jayhawks’ latest album, “Hollywood Town Hall.”

Familiar styles, even closely mimicked styles, can pay off with memorable music if played intensely and with emotional conviction. But the Jayhawks’ lead singer, Mark Olson, failed to provide much of that. His grainy voice rose and fell monotonously.

Louris almost compensated with strong tenor harmonies. One began to suspect that the Jayhawks have the wrong guy in the driver’s seat, a suspicion confirmed when Louris took over lead vocals briefly and mustered much more bite and feeling than his partner had.

Victoria Williams joined the Jayhawks on stage during much of their hourlong set, although she might as well have been back in her native Louisiana for all you could hear of her singing and guitar playing.

Both the Jayhawks and Sweet contributed to “Sweet Relief,” a recent album in which other artists covered songs by the distinctive Los Angeles singer-songwriter to raise money for uninsured medical expenses related to her treatment for multiple sclerosis.

Opening was Hollyfaith, a rookie band from Atlanta that was unremarkable but not quite dismissible.

The foursome played well enough to rock solidly at times, and singer Rob Aldridge showed potential with a throaty son-of-Jim Morrison voice. But there wasn’t much to sustain musical interest in a too-long, 48-minute set.

Hollyfaith echoed Seattle’s Screaming Trees in combining a psychedelic ‘60s garage-rock sound with heavy, near-grunge density. The Trees are a B-minus band, at best. Hollyfaith’s debut album, “Purrrr,” might be worth a C-minus, if you don’t deduct points for the band’s leaden in-concert cover of the David Bowie song, “The Jean Genie.”