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Oct 22, 2010Sadly, nearly half the songs on the album are bland, boring, and, quite unabashedly, one-dimensional.
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Lame lyrics aside, Sugar demonstrates Dead Confederate's natural talent for grunge atmospherics, but they could use some songwriting workshops before tackling their third effort.
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Kerrang!Swirling, heady and claustrophobic at times, this is well worth further investigation. [21 Aug 2010, p.51]
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It's unfair to saddle Dead Confederate with the burden of the entire Athens tradition, or look for it to be anything other than a band making a record. But Sugar would have been much more interesting if these guys had focused on that instead of trying to be five or six bands at once.
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In spite of the "grunge revivalist" tag that gets hung on Morris and crew, though, Sugar doesn't have much of a retro feel; rather, it imagines a world in which My Morning Jacket and Band Of Horses woke up, got loose, cranked it up, and explored some of the darker, weirder corners of their world.
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The idea of "wounded optimism" applies to Sugar as a whole, at least from a listener's perspective. There's just enough good material here to believe that the problems with the record represent a temporary misstep, or a flawed approach, rather than a fundamental change in the band.
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Q MagazineThe arrival of J Mascis for Giving It All Away lightens the mood, but it's impossible to shake the sense Sugar is the sound of a band in transition. [Oct 2010, p.107]
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The guys still place more emphasis on mood than movement, but they're learning how to create atmospheres without resorting to stoner rock, which makes Sugar a step in the right direction.
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The problem is that the band seems to want to go mainstream as it stood in 1995. As a result, they've lost a lot of what made them unique.
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Save for a few tracks, you get exactly what you'd expect from a band like Dead Confederate: middle of the road alternative rock music with seemingly little depth and a whole lot of cliches.
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Sugar is notable as much for what's missing as for what's been honed and emphasized. Morris no longer howls like Kurt Cobain, nor does he drawl so studiously. There are no 12- or seven-minute stoner epics either; instead, the songs are shorter, more compact, punchier. Almost missing: personality.
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The band shows range, but there's never a moment where all the elements cohere into something completely unique. Even with more professional-sounding production and songwriting, they still can't escape their influences.
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It's all epic, if slightly textbook stuff, but the title track and By Design conjure up a brooding menace rarely heard since Jane's Addiction.
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UncutSugar, by comparison [to "Wrecking Ball"], feels laboured. [Sep 2010, p.91]
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Dead Confederate have possibly made the best record out of all their contemporaries this year, which surely beckons the question 'How much longer can they be ignored?' Time to pay attention methinks...