Once upon a time, garage rock had seemingly run its course. Everyone and their mother had an unoriginal, scruffy, slacker band, each one worse than the last. Then Athenians the Sugar Dicks came along with their lone effort, Everybody’s Dead, to remind us all how much fun music can be when indie is more of an ethic than a genre. And the funny thing is that it’s alarmingly simple. You really don’t need some heavy point to make. You just need a good sense of what fun, unpretentious music sounds and feels like, which means those making the music must possess those qualities within, too. And the Sugar Dicks seem to have them in spades. While down-to-earth tunes can sometimes be hard to come by in today’s world of woe-is-me songwriting, this band has managed to string together eight songs worth of fuzzy guitars and molten energy, bearing earnest comparisons to early ’90s DIY heroes like Superchunk.
It really is a shame this album is a one-off. In a music-drenched town like Athens, it must be hard for a band to truly distinguish itself. The Sugar Dicks just might have had what it takes.
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