The artier, more abstract style of Matthew Sweet’s 13th studio album, Modern Art, was influenced in part by the singer’s sideline gig selling his own hand-made ceramics on Etsy. “In the making of pottery, I really see when things get abstract or when things are more normal forms,” he told Rolling Stone. “Part of the way I think I was looking at Modern Art in making it was trying to come at things in a little bit more abstract way, but without becoming cold or minimalist – keeping some kind of heart and feeling in it while still messing around with stuff. If you hear the whole ‘She Walks the Night,’ it’s like I was trying to make a song and tear it in half, or run chords backwards from where they’d been at first.”
Another review:
On September 20, 2012, Matthew Sweet will release Modern Art (Missing Piece Records), the eagerly anticipated follow-up to 2008’s Sunshine Lies.
Throughout a career that stretches back to the mid-‘80s, Matthew Sweet has never followed trends, though his landmark 1991 album Girlfriend was responsible for starting one: in fact, many critics note that most power pop records made during the ‘90s owe a tremendous debt to Sweet. Two decades after the release of that iconic album, Sweet has once again swung for the fences – and connected – with the boldly experimental, yet deeply personal Modern Art.
