Matthew Sweet is one of those artists who have been around for a long time and enjoyed occasional commercial success, with his jangly alt/pop sound. The ebbs and flows of his career and his distinctive yet undeniably Beatlesque approach reminds me in kind of a generalized way to Neil Finn's Crowded House.

Most fans point to Sweet's '91 release Girlfriend as his finest work and I wouldn't disagree. Since then his production has been consistent if not a bit spotty in quality. He is, however, tirelessly prolific as a songwriter - in fact it's a bit of esoteric in musical circles. (Quite often I've heard different musician's say things like "that guy writes more songs than Matthew Sweet).

In my book Sweet has released 4 solid 4 Star records throughout his career, I won't list them but I consider his recent side-project The Thorns to be among them. There's little doubt that Sweet did the lion's share of the good writing and singing on that mostly winning '03 collaboration with Pete Droge and Shawn Mullins.

The problem with spreading the sugar too thin is that the Sweetness can become diluted. Which is, mostly the problem with Living Things. In case you were unaware, Matthew also released another album last year Kimi Ga Suki Raifu which was, at the time, only available in Japan (though I see it listed on Amazon for domestic prices - so it maybe readily available now). Matthew has a fond spot for the Japanese and according to Kyle England this is a terrific record - his review can be found on this site in 2003.

Sweet's new one starts off with an island flavored, ode to a tropical paradise called "Big Cats of Shambala." It's a timbale-smothered affair that adds nothing to the legend of Shambala that Three Dog Night. didn't cover 30 years ago. The timbales reappear later in the record but do little to improve matters. Leave the timbales to Jimmy Buffet and Perry Farrell.

The album comes out to the gates with four straight tunes that are nothing if not unremarkable, fortunately the slower more melodic track 5 "In My Tree" finds Sweet tapping into that good stuff once again. Unfortunately you have to wait for 3 more tracks before he regains his footing again with "In My Time" which smacks of that CSN-vibe that he exploited so successfully with Droge and Mullins.

The final 3 tracks hold up this standard, but even they seem a bit labored, and suffer from what has become kind of a generic sound for Sweet. I can't give Living Things a very high recommendation, it's more like Leftover Things and really sound like a collection of quirky ideas left laying around from his 2003 work.