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| | You're missing what I found most interesting on revisiting this record ten years later: how Bob Mould's being out of the closet now recasts the songs. "The Gift" isn't another oblique song about resentment, as I imagined it to be when I was listening to this album over and over again in high school, but rather a fairly direct song about AIDS. |
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| | The hindsight on this album is appropriately examined through the lens of Mould's own personality- nice job. For me, my memories and initial feelings compete a bit with what I now know of Mould. When I first bought Copper Blue I was 14 and liked to pick up anything that my friends weren't. I liked the strangely uniform chaos it tunneled through; which made me interested but always a little disappointed in FU:EL that it floated so far into the ultrapop waters. I learned to love it for what it was, but given that we were teased with a blistering Beaster in-between, it's no wonder new fans are so confused by the two LP's and EP. A great example of that is the weird FU:EL B-Sides compilation, Besides, which also came with a very sloppy and unfulfilling live CD The Joke Is Always On Us...Sometimes which made me feel like the joke was quite possibly on me. Many moons later I still look fondly on the exercise that was Sugar, and the enjoyment some tracks still stir. In some ways I wish he'd look at music that way again- because of that weird conservative but experimental flavor he was bringing at the time (even if it was a result of frustration and ego). It made him seem a bit more playful than the larger pendulum swings that Bowie was taking during the same years, and it was a neat playground to watch, if not enjoy.
Great writeup. |
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| | interesting. 'flip your wig' is my favorite huskers record, and i loved 'fu:el' but not 'copper blue,' so your estimation of all of those records seems, for me, pretty spot on. |
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| | Beaster is the best Sugar album. |
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| | Yep, by about ten million miles. Fun fact: "Your Favorite Thing" is a rip-off - er, homage - of "Blown a Wish" by My Bloody Valentine. |
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