A scant 24 hours before he was scheduled to perform at Columbia, South Carolina's Elbow Room with his five-piece touring outfit, Matthew Sweet was feeling a tad under the weather. At first, he thought it might pass somewhere in Florida.

"But then we played this show in Tallahassee and I got really, really sick," Sweet remembered, relaxing in his mammoth touring bus minutes after Thursday night's ebullient, sold-out show. "It was hard to cover up for the bad voice. I had to get a cortisone shot just to be able to play."

Sweet didn't have to do much covering up Thursday, when he and his backing band -- led, as it usually is, by the nonchalantly ferocious lead guitarist Ivan Julian -- delivered a blistering 21-song, 90-minute set to advance his forthcoming album "Blue Sky On Mars" (Zoo Entertainment). Not bad for a guy who, scarcely a day earlier, was forced to succumb to a shot in the derriere.

Though he only played five new tunes during this club date -- one of 20 Sweet was doing as part of a pre-release "mini-tour" -- Sweet could be forgiven for relying mostly on material from his last three albums. After all, as he explained later, he had been sick as a dog while sorting out which new material to play and wanted to give the fans what they were yelling to hear: the hits. Or near-hits, as the case might be. And frankly, what was there to forgive?

Drawing liberally on the fizzy power-pop gems from "Girlfriend," "Altered Beast," and "100% Fun," Sweet offered a reminder to anyone who didn't already know that his is a song catalog that rivals just about anybody's when it comes to hooks and melody.

As evidenced by the scattering of the few new tunes he sprinkled through pop-rock nuggets like "Girlfriend," Sweet continues to be thoroughly obsessed with themes of, well, obsession and the power struggles associated with love -- requited and unrequited. Though he's not necessarily breaking any new ground, few artists explore that familiar terrain with the verve, willfully skewed intelligence, and outright stalker-creepiness that Sweet brings to the subject.

True to form, "Where You Get Love," his slated new single, featured an infectious, wraparound hook and Sweet's unadorned tenor front and center in the mix, alternately defiant and pleading. Although he became momentarily annoyed when someone requested "Evangeline" before he even launched into the second song of his set (he was saving that for later, it turned out), Sweet was overall in very good humor throughout. From the moment he hit the stage at 11:15 p.m. until he closed up shop an hour-and-a-half later, Sweet exuded the commitment and exuberance of someone reveling in playing for an audience again.

Opening with the full frontal sonic assault of "Dinosaur Act" off 1993's "Altered Beast," Sweet set the tone and the terms of the evening early, offering his usual contrast of jukebox melody and menacing crunch to magnificent effect. And during ripping versions of songs like "Divine Intervention" and "The Ugly Truth," he threw more than a few broad grins at Julian, whose knotty, searing lead guitar work gave the implied ominousness in Sweet's songs their dangerous reality. If Sweet's writing occasionally recalls David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," Julian was Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth. The remainder of the supporting cast --- which also included bassist Tony Marsico, and Velvet Crush alums Paul Chastain (keyboards) and Ric Menck (drums) -- was equally adept at helping Sweet issue his brooding ultimatums and desperate confessions with brutal authority.

Though the sound was consistently trebly and a bit distorted (a minor, and nearly inevitable, drawback given Sweet's penchant for turning the knobs up to eleven), the shimmering, pure gorgeousness of Sweet's pop songcraft was as sparkling as the silver guitar he strapped on for the first of his two encores, which included the dusky, reverb-drenched beauty of the Kinks' ballad "Waterloo Sunset" and the Sci-Fi glam of David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream."

The band adroitly, and repeatedly, shifted gears to accommodate Sweet's change in mood, going from the tortured nihilism of "Someone To Pull The Trigger" to a spiraling, playful reading of "Time Capsule." Judging from the look on his face, by the end of the