Pleasantly surprised, I never thought you'd realize

Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

11/09/94 : File Under: Easy Listening - Sugar


I remember two things about Sugar - 1) it featured someone who was reasonably well known and 2) I didn't like them. But either of those things could be wrong..

Actually, I didn't mind this at all - it might even be brave enough to say I liked it. It's not exactly easy listening but it falls somewhere between the somewhat nebulous US umbrellas of grunge and punk and they're all decent enough songs played well. I feel I'm unlikely to revisit it, but I suspect there will be people who see this that think "wow - I've not heard that in years" so hopefully they'll work up a smile revisiting it. It's quite the album cover as well, isn't it?

We're at a surprisingly high #7 in the charts this week on a not so surprisingly short four week run, with this being as high as it got. The top five this week were The Three Tenors live, Oasis, the Wet Wet Wet best-of, the Cyndi Lauper best-of and Blur and the next highest new entry was Joe Cocker (#9 - also surprisingly high).

Wikipedia tells us this was their second and final album and it's also known as F.U.E.L, which I like. The band member who was reasonably well known was Bob Mould of Husker Du and he described it as punk, but Wikipedia tells me it's actually power pop (spoiler alert - it's not power pop). The only other thing that jumped out at me is that the band members all recorded their stuff separately and the drums were done last, which seems like a massively counterintuitive way of doing it to me (but I have absolutely no knowledge about any of that kinda thing). Critically, it was very well received and commercially it got to #10 in New Zealand but only #50 in the US - it's weird how some very US sounding bands did way much better over here than they did at home.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent copy for three quid and the most you can spend on it is £30 for a vinyl copy - which all seems surprisingly reasonable compared to many other albums. My expectations were low for this but it easily exceeded them - check it out if you don't know it.

04/09/94 - Not the happiest album ever
18/09/94 - Yeah, I liked this

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