Expanded editions of Sugar’s two albums and one EP get the reevaluations they deserve. Siding with Bob Christgau, Dan Weiss posits File Under: Easy Listening as their masterwork, and certainly Bob Mould made no stronger case for his pop mastery (imagine “Believe What You’re Saying” getting a Richard Marx production); but bassist David Barbe’s George Harrison move doesn’t surpass B-side “Mind is an Island” (it’s “Only a Northern Song” competing with “Old Brown Shoe”) and Grant Hart earned a dismissal more incisive than “Granny Cool” (it’s Grandpa Cool wearing a cardigan on the back cover of 1989′s Workbook). On the other hand, Beaster is an airtight case for the efficacy of an EP, especially when “JC Auto” and “Feeling Better” by themselves crush full length albums with chain-wrapped tires.
I explained briefly a few months ago what those records meant to an eighteen-year-old man for whom Sugar were, to use Eric Harvey’s analogy, the Wings to Husker Du’s Beatles — only imagine if Wings had released two albums’ worth of “Jet.”
