Where Golden Time dealt mostly with boy-girl relationships (the pitfalls and missteps, mostly), the aptly titled Sweet Bird of Youth casts a backward glance at a youth filled with the innocence and stifling familiarity of living in a small town--in this case Cabbagetown, Georgia, where the band was founded and where it recorded the album on its own in a storefront. At times nostalgic (the organ occasionally leans toward sounds borrowed from carnival midways or old soul records), the frenzy hits in "No Books About It" when Lopez questions the way small communities encourage members to release their bottled-up-to-bursting emotions by throwing vases or sewing dolls, keeping anger confined to acceptable arenas instead of exposing it through writing, singing, or filmmaking. Armed with a megaphone rather than a microscope, Lopez leads Hughes, Joiner, and Lesemann into the anthem-like closer in which he calls for someone to "strangle the band with yer guitar cords, strike down the band with a Golden Globe."
The ardor of Golden Time's "Little Caesar on a Bicycle" remains intact on Sweet Bird of Youth, only with the bass-thumping punkabilly fused with the '60s rock swagger of a kid discovering his dad's Henry Mancini and Kurt Weill records (aided by the band's duet with Shannon Wright on "It's Destiny"). The yearning Southern Gothic narratives unleashed in the previous album's "Across the Piedmont" and "In the Woods of Hemlock Park" continue throughout with song-stories that ache like poems but still burn like rock and roll, including such cuts as "Please Don't Go Downtown Tonight," "I Hope You Never See Me Like This," and "Put It Right Out of Your Mind," in which Lopez sings, "It ain't no shame to come from a dingy place/Sometimes you just got to leave home just to find out where yer from." Sometimes coming home feels just as good.
