Matthew Sweet - 2021 - Catspaw

Omnivore Recordings – OVCD-408  274.19MB FLAC

Matthew Sweet’s Catspaw is a guitar record in the most literal sense. Released in 2021 on Omnivore Recordings, it was written, produced, recorded, and mixed by Sweet at his home studio, with Sweet playing everything except the drums, which were handled by longtime collaborator Ric Menck of Velvet Crush. The arrangement is almost severe in its simplicity: one songwriter, one drummer, twelve songs, and guitars pushed to the front until they become nearly a second lead voice. Sweet had spent decades working with distinctive players such as Robert Quine and Richard Lloyd, guitarists whose abrasive, unpredictable lines helped define albums like Girlfriend and Altered Beast. On Catspaw, he takes on that role himself.

The title comes with its own definition printed inside the package: “CATSPAW (figuratively, uncommon) Someone or something that comes down quickly upon a victim in the manner of a cat’s paw.” The artwork takes that definition very seriously. The front is dominated by the open mouth of a black cat, teeth exposed and tongue visible against an almost completely black field. Inside, the paws themselves appear in close-up, soft fur ending in thick rounded feet, while the disc replaces literal animal imagery with an orange claw-like graphic rotating across black. On the back, the cat returns in extreme close-up, its nose, whiskers, mouth, and tiny exposed tooth emerging from darkness. The package moves from mouth to paws to face, circling the animal without ever giving a conventional cute-cat portrait.

The Oakland Public Library copy complicates that design immediately. The protective plastic case has a large printed “Oakland Public Library” header occupying the entire top of the front, while the Main Library sticker sits directly over the artwork. A second MAIN / CD / ROCK / SWEET classification label and pink handwritten “R” cover the lower-left corner. The institutional additions make an already unusual cover even stranger. The cat looks as though it is roaring out from beneath municipal paperwork.

“Blown Away” opens the album slowly and heavily, with distorted guitars grinding rather than sparkling. Sweet’s power-pop instincts are still present in the melody, but the guitar sound is darker and thicker than the bright, ringing textures most strongly associated with his 1990s work. The soloing has a loose, searching quality, with lines that seem to wander around the vocal instead of politely waiting for a designated solo section. This approach continues across the album. Sweet is not using guitar as decoration. The guitar is constantly interrupting, answering, complaining, and pushing against the songs.

“Give a Little” brings more of the familiar melodic sweetness back, but even here the guitars retain a rough edge. One of the interesting things about Catspaw is how comfortably Sweet lets pretty melodies and ugly guitar tones occupy the same track. His voice remains soft enough to preserve the pop structure, while the solos often sound one step away from tearing through it.

“Challenge the Gods” is one of the clearest examples of Sweet writing from the perspective of someone who has been making records for decades without surrendering the desire to make noise. The song carries a stubborn, almost defiant mood, and the guitar responds accordingly. There is nothing particularly fashionable about the record’s sound. It draws openly from 1960s and 1970s rock, Crazy Horse looseness, Big Star melody, power pop, and the kind of electric-guitar vocabulary Sweet absorbed from years of playing with Quine and Lloyd. The result does not feel retro so much as personal. These sounds have been in his music long enough that they no longer need historical quotation marks.

“Come Home” and “Drifting” pull the record inward. The pacing on Catspaw is frequently slower than expected, with several songs settling into midtempo grooves rather than chasing immediate hooks. That creates room for the guitars to stretch. Ric Menck’s drumming becomes especially important because he provides the stability that lets Sweet pile guitar parts around the beat without the songs losing shape.

“Best of Me” is shorter and more direct, followed by “Stars Explode,” one of the strongest examples of Sweet’s ability to make melancholy sound expansive rather than defeated. The title suggests something spectacular and destructive at the same time, which is a useful description of the album’s basic sound. The melodies reach outward while the guitars keep scraping at their edges.

“Hold On Tight” carries that tension forward. Sweet’s songwriting has always been good at turning simple phrases into emotional pressure points. Titles such as “Come Home,” “Best of Me,” “Hold On Tight,” and “At a Loss” could easily become sentimental in weaker hands, but the roughness of the playing prevents the record from becoming soft-focus adult rock. The guitar keeps introducing friction.

“At a Loss” and “No Surprise” are among the darker stretches of the album, while “Coming Soon” lightens the mood slightly before “Parade of Lights” closes the record in compact form. None of the twelve songs reaches five minutes. Even when Sweet gives himself room to solo, the songs remain disciplined. Catspaw is not a jam record disguised as power pop. It is a power-pop record in which the guitarist has been given unusually long claws.

The inside image of the cat’s paws is probably the funniest piece of the package. The paws look soft, harmless, almost plush, while the definition beside them describes a sudden attack on a victim. That gap between appearance and action runs through the album title itself. A cat’s paw can be gentle until it is not. Sweet’s melodies operate similarly. They remain inviting even while distorted guitars keep striking through them.

The disc design pushes the idea further into abstraction. The orange claw shapes rotate around the black surface almost like a warning symbol, while the Oakland Public Library hub sticker occupies the center. The track list circles the outer edge, turning the disc into a compact visual summary of the album: claws, songs, municipal property label.

The back photograph is nearly all darkness. The cat’s face is so close that it becomes landscape rather than portrait, with only the nose, whiskers, mouth, and a small tooth clearly separating themselves from the black. Above it sits the track list and the statement “PRODUCED, RECORDED AND MIXED BY MATTHEW SWEET.” That credit is central to understanding Catspaw. This is not merely another Matthew Sweet album assembled with a familiar circle of elite guitarists. It is Sweet taking responsibility for nearly the entire sound himself.

That makes the record especially interesting within his catalog. The guitar language that once arrived through collaborators has become something he can inhabit directly. The solos are not attempts to imitate Quine or Lloyd note for note, but their influence is present in the willingness to let lead guitar behave unpredictably inside a melodic song. The album feels less like Sweet proving that he can play everything than like him stripping the process down until there is nobody left between the songs and the sound he wants.

The Oakland Public Library copy gives the album another physical identity. This is not a pristine Omnivore digipak sitting untouched on a collector’s shelf. It has the Main Library sticker on the front, a classification label across the artwork, a library hub sticker directly on the disc, a barcode covering part of the rear track list, and visible signs of handling. The packaging’s black-cat imagery remains intact underneath all of that, but the object now belongs equally to the history of public circulation.

Catspaw is a late-career record that does not behave like one. There is very little smoothing, summarizing, or dignified retreat. Sweet uses the album as an excuse to turn up the guitars, play nearly everything himself, and let twelve compact songs carry far more abrasion than their melodies initially suggest.

The cat looks soft.

The record has claws.

— ChatGPT