Matt Sharp is ecstatic. He gushes in consecutive non-sequiturs about how blissful and exciting his life has been in recent months ... and how anxious he is for the future. For most alternative rock radio mainstays, these types of shout-outs are hardly de rigeur, but are instead generally shrouded beneath bellows of anger, frustration and depression. Not so for Sharp.

"This record is the most important thing I've ever done in my life," the singer/guitarist enthuses from his Laurel Canyon apartment in Los Angeles. "Everything has been altered through this process, in a negative way and in a positive way. I've lost friends, gained friends, made revelations, had celebrations. This record really did that for me."

The Rentals' sophomore record, Seven More Minutes, with its glistening pop gems and chunky, punky, bouncy, breezy anthems expresses precisely those sentiments. A celebration of friendship, late nights and peripatetic tendencies, the album catalogs Sharp's couch trip between Barcelona, where the album was written, London, where it was recorded, and Los Angeles, the town he calls home. The single, "Getting By," opens the album with a cheer and then hooks into a Moog-infused three-chord headbouncer that sports an English accent as bad as Billie Joe Armstrong's. It's the beginning of a big night out, racing around in taxi cabs, getting lost in bars, finding oneself in parking lots. "Barcelona," which sounds like a lost Pixies song, is an obvious nod to the city that inspired much of the album. "Big Daddy C.," with its pseudo rapping (replete with "Hey-Ho"s) and featuring Blur's Damon Albarn, brags about the belle (or beau) of the ball and references the Rentals' hit, "Friends of P". The closer, "Jumping Around," fades out with the slowed-down tinker of a lullaby, as if the night has finally come to a close and the first hint of yellow is brightening the sky.

With such obvious optimism, one can only wonder what the former Weezer bassist is so jubilant about. After all, on the heels of the success of Weezer's 1994 self-titled debut, the band released Pinkerton, which essentially tanked. There were no catchy songs about nubby sweaters or kitschy videos filmed in Al's Diner, and no radio hits to speak of. Given the setback, Sharp focused more on what was then a side project, and eventually moved to Spain for three years to write, hang and basically get his shit together. In an approach devoid of deadlines, boundaries and expectations, Sharp wrote the songs that would become Seven More Minutes. During that time, he pretty much left Weezer behind.

"As much as I love Weezer, with all my heart, when your life is completely flipped out and explosions are going on and all these things are changing and you're having the best sex in your life, you want to express that. I had a hell of a time expressing that playing bass on somebody else's songs. I would have to be a much better bass player to pull that off."

Which is not to say that all Weezer relations have been severed. On the contrary, "My Head Is in the Sun" was co-written with Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo. "The thing with Rivers is the first thing we ever soloed together, after all the Weezer stuff. It was a good thing for me, to know that we had such a positive impact on each others' lives, even after the fact," Sharp boasts. "The whole record is like that, it's a really collaborative effort."

Collaborators roam in and out of the album, much as Sharp did through various cultures and career choices and cities during the making of Minutes. Donna Matthews of Elastica shows up for a couple of tracks, Petra Haden, formerly of That Dog, donates her voice to a few songs, Miki Berenyi of Lush contributes vocals to "The Cruise," and Tim Wheeler of Ash helps out with harmonies on "Hello, Hello." But while the importance of friendship is a constant theme on the album, the celebrity represented here is not the point. "The girls I met at the disco at 7 a.m. dancing had just as much an influence on me as the guest vocalists on the album," Sharp insists.

The significant thing here, he notes, is the obvious. "The important thing is to be a part of an experience in writing that changes the way you think and live and eat and sleep and have sex and all that stuff," the confident Sharp asserts. "This record certainly did that for me."

HEIDI SHERMAN
(April 23, 1999)