The Sugarcubes "Life's Too Good" [1988]

Among the many, many inexplicable things about the late-80s indie music scene was that there was a celebrated American band called Pixies. Apparently something was lost in translation on the way to Iceland, because it becomes obvious within the first few minutes of The Sugarcubes' debut "Life's Too Good" that this young band thinks their purpose is to behave like actual pixies. I guess irony isn't real big on that isolated, freezing cold island. Fronted by an apparent eskimo girl named Bjork with a bizarre holler that may have been developed to clear fjords, The Sugarcubes clambered onto the barren London scene at the time as if they were some sort of approximation of the B-52s from outer space, complete with an understated Scandinavian stiff male carnival barker giving intros to Bjork's performances like the circus freak she is. Yet you'd be mistaken for thinking the culmination of this odd, post-new wave sound amounted to anything more remarkable than an increasingly grating novelty. Bjork in particular presents herself as a schizoid mountain yodeler in a dog collar on a very short leash, and the longer her Euro MC goes on, the less I'm convinced his performance is suitably tongue-in-cheek. This band simply may have been completely unaware of how foolish they were coming off; perhaps bothering to listen to this album at all is nothing more than a mean-spirited act of being amused by the (much) less fortunate.