MATTHEW is a quartet. Four young men who wear who they are and what they do on their sleeves with no pretense and no airs. The band’s debut album, Everybody Down, co-produced by Paul Q. Kolderie (Radiohead, Hole, Morphine) and George Howard (Jess Klein, Chuck E. Weiss), is full of the melody and energy that they have honed on the Chicago club circuit in their two year existence.
Brian McSweeney (guitar & vocals), Jason Sipe (guitar), James Scott (bass), and Matt Sumpter (drums) began playing together in Chicago in late-1999, coming together from the ashes of Lackluster, another Windy City quartet that included McSweeney, Scott, and Sumpter. After playing in and around the Midwest for two years, McSweeney decided to wind that quartet down in late 1998 in favor of pursuing a project of his own. Spending a year writing, demoing, and crystallizing the direction of his muse, he reconvened with Scott and Sumpter in late ’99 to form MATTHEW.
Characterizing their music as a mixture of pop songs and artier songs, Brian strives to fill the band’s work with elements and dynamics that evoke an emotional response. A disciplined critic of his own songwriting, McSweeney acknowledges that musical appeal is relative and feels that there’s an accountability that songwriters and musicians have to themselves there’s no point wasting people’s time with filler. A far cry from I’d Die For You, the first song he wrote in the ninth grade, which he quips probably would have made a good Bon Jovi song.
Shouldering an artistic responsibility that is often absent in today’s world of rock yet avoiding the often inherent trap of pompous self-importance, MATTHEW finds itself in a position of being unique in their straightforwardness.
Viewing the band as a square, McSweeney speaks of the importance of each of the four sides in making up the whole, likening it to the interrelationships between he and his band mates. Taking the geometry a step further, MATTHEW’s distinct halves McSweeney and Sumpter fill the role of the focused, precise, and disciplined side while Sipe and Scott form the more loose, but equally intense balancing element also prove the sum to be greater than the individual parts. Brian and Matt, both born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia and on-again, off-again band mates since their early teens (they met when they discovered they were both dating the same girl neither ended up with her), instinctually lock in to form the foundation while Jason and James, both native Chicagoans, add the color. The left-brain and right-brain of MATTHEW, if you will.
McSweeney’s pop sensibility and distinctive vocals anchor the sound, giving the full-bore guitar bluster of "Open Wide" and "Streams" their depth, and leading spacious-but-powerful mid-tempo/moderately-paced numbers and ballads like "This Time," "The Darkest Night," "Overboard," and "Where Did You Go" through the ebbs and flows that steer them to their crescendos. Speaking both as a songwriter and expressing the sentiments of the band as a whole, Brian states that "unless our music makes someone feel something - beginning with me - it’s not worth doing." Indications that they’ve been successful in reaching that goal, however large or small they may be, are the motivation for what they do. McSweeney humbly states, "that’s the biggest complement we can get - affecting someone’s emotions and getting a reaction." Honest, vibrant, and alive.
MATTHEW is: Brian McSweeney [guitar & vocals] Matt Sumpter [drums] James Scott [bass] Jason Sipe [guitar]
