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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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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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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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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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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 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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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.