Drawing lines back to a host of NYC confronters such as Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Sarah Register and Andrya Ambro — otherwise known as Talk Normal — bring us Sugarland, a pulsing, screeching, penetratingly metallic record that somehow never ceases to be catchy. The album may not appeal to those who usually like to find melodies, choruses or anything considered “nice” in their music, but the songs are far from unlistenable. The pair snarls and moans convincingly for 45 minutes, and apart from occasionally stretching ideas too thin and risking repetition, their use of minimal instrumentation over murky and static-soaked beats is as engaging and bad-ass as any of their predecessors.
The Sugarland of the title must be the band’s hometown of Brooklyn — sugary because of the abundance of crunching, clanking, grinding sounds that are the sonic byproducts of the industrious activities that keep the NYC borough buzzing around the clock. The pair has invoked this noise in the hypnotizing rhythms and washes that make up most of the album and cleverly turned them into noise-rock — music that symphonizes the cacophony of the city.
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