Life’s Too Good by The Sugarcubes is typically considered to be the band’s best album, for good reasons too. It is their debut album, released on April 5, 1988. The album was produced by both Derek Birkett and Ray Shulman, the former also worked with The Sundays. Its genres differ between websites but post-punk and new wave seem to be the most consistent. I think it’s also important to note that this band is just another band with more people in it, K.U.K.L., I don’t recommend it though it is very odd.
This band is known for one person because of how popular they became later in their career. Björk is of course a much bigger artist on her own, known more for her pop and dance music now but her vocals here are great too. Einar Örn Benediktsson is a secondary vocalist which I’ll get into later. Besides that the rest of the band is great, with Thor Eldon playing guitar, Bragi Olafsson on bass, Einar Mellax on keyboard and Siggi Baldursson with drums. With this group they are able to do quite a bit, every song sounding different than the other which lets it cover every sound. The band itself was behind the publishers One Little Indian and Elektra.
I have one big problem with this album, and it is in most of the songs in it. Einar Örn Benediktsson seems to ruin most of the songs he sings on, his voice almost seems cartoonish with the best word I can think of is dastardly. I think the reason why he sounds so bad is because his accent is made for Icelandic, which makes English sound really bad. The biggest highlight of this album is for sure “Birthday” because it lacks Einar Örn’s voice and it also stands out so much compared to everything else on this album. Some other good songs on the album is “Motorcrash” and “F***ing in Rhythm & Sorrow”. I’d also like to point out that “Dragon” is actually really good, probably because Einar Örn is singing in Icelandic and it sounds more in the line of metal.
Being straight to the point this album is a 2.5/5, pretty obvious why. If you can avoid Einar then you may be in for a treat but it is really hard to not hear him pop in. I don’t recommend this album, if you want cool vocals just listen to Björk Debut is really good and doesn’t make the same mistakes. It sucks to see such a waste of talent because “Birthday” is really where Björk can show off her full capabilities but it is just weighed down by such irritating secondary vocals. I do think they do remedy this major problem in later albums but it still isn’t where it could be. Overall, good half the time, bad the other half.
