Pre-Eminent Power Popster Matthew Sweet Injects Depth & Brevity on ‘Tomorrow’s Daughter’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

[rating=8.00]

Call it a companion piece or a mirror image, Tomorrow’s Daughter is a more than worthwhile follow-up to Matthew Sweet’s release of last year, Tomorrow Forever. After constructing his own studio in a new home in Omaha, NE, he originally recorded 38 songs for that 2017 title and cut down the track total to seventeen for its final issue. Subsequently released as an exclusive bonus offering to backers of the original Kickstarter campaign, twelve of the remaining twenty-one tracks were intended for official release at a later date, the result of which is this 2018 sequel.

Matthew Sweet has declared these dozen tracks of a piece and that clarity certainly permeates the sound quality here too: chiming guitars resound as loudly as the layered vocal harmonies of “I Belong to You.” In his preferred method of working (in his Black Squirrel Submarine home studio), he builds tracks from the rhythm section up, yet there’s no sense of mechanical motion on the part of the players here. On the contrary, the bond of a real band coalesces between the multi-instrumentalist/songwriter/ producers and longstanding collaborators including drummer Ric Menck and current tourmate of guitarist Jason Victor. And that sense of unity also permeates the participation of other musicians, including drummer Debbi Peterson of the Bangles, incorporated from the original sessions.

The pre-eminent power-popster of our time injects genuine maturity into the generally uplifting qualities typified by the genre, so Tomorrow’s Daughter isn’t an unremittingly cheery piece of work. The song “Run Away,” for instance, radiates a somewhat wan, doleful tone emitted in the performance as well, but two electric guitar breaks from John Moreman function as an exorcism of bitterness and anger. In contrast, on “Lady Frankenstein,” Matthew himself adopts a tongue-in-cheek attitude as he sings, thereby maintaining a healthy detachment from his subject(s). And on “Years,” the author depicts emotion from a variety of perspectives, an effect mirrored in the stereo mix. The alternating right-left placement of the clipped guitar fills also reminds this generally tuneful music deserves to be played loud: as has usually been the case during the course of his career, Sweet’s sound is deceptively noisy by nature.

The relative brevity of the individual cuts, totaling roughly forty minutes in all, further speaks to the clearheaded approach Matthew Sweet brought to the successive edits on the copious products of a project essentially begun five years ago. As a result, his methodology fosters nuanced tracks such as “Something Someone,” this number belies its arrangement from just three musicians (including the leader himself) because it is a direct reflection of the tune’s emotional underpinnings. Meanwhile, the inclusion of acoustic guitars, on “Now Was the Future” and “Ever After,” only adds further depth right in line with the feelings that gave birth to the material itself. And the logic that compels placing “Can’t Pretend” as the penultimate track effectively telegraphs the finality of “Passerby” as the conclusion of a tale well-told.

Tomorrow’s Daughter is a more conventional collection than the previous album, but it is arguably superior for that very uniformity. The latest entry in a more broad discography, including numerous collaborations, Matthew Sweet’s thirteenth studio album under his own name stands at once as a unified effort unto itself and of a piece with the record immediately preceding it (right down to the eye-opening cover art and the release on his independent Honeycomb Hideout label). The man’s body of work grows increasingly impressive the more prolific he becomes.