Review Summary: The Band That Wouldn't Die, Part 4: If It Ain't Broke, Don't Sugarfix It
Sugarfix was yet another step away from pure hardcore for the Dwarves, slower and less shock-oriented than anything the band had released since their debut. The production value was upped again, too, featuring even more sampled audio than
Little Girls and lots of guitar multitracking that led to a sharp, meaty tone put to great use on some of the band’s best riffs to date.
And there’s another thing that’s changed: These songs have real riffs now. No longer content with simply regurgitating different combinations of power chords, guitarist HeWhoCannotBeNamed devised a handful of simple-yet-hard-hitting riffs to deploy across the tracklist, a prime example being the fantastic opener “Anybody Out There”, which feels almost thrash metal-indebted thanks to HeWho’s propulsive central guitar figure.
Sugarfix is hardly offensive by the usual Dwarves standards, but it positively seethes with attitude. Lots of minor pentatonic stuff here, folks. Some of it is your standard Dwarves hardcore like “New Orleans”, some of it is more mid-tempo fare like “Lies”, but it’s all mean, tough-as-nails rock music, the glaring exceptions being “Underworld” and especially “Saturday Night”, two bits of bubblegummy Ramones worship that hinted at the direction the band would soon be pursuing full-time.
In many ways,
Sugarfix was a watershed moment for the Dwarves, attempting to explore several musical directions while still holding on to vestiges of their earlier sound. The result was an album that, while eminently enjoyable, also seemed somewhat at odds with itself. It didn’t help that the album’s rollout was nothing short of disastrous- A publicity stunt faking HeWhoCannotBeNamed’s death saw them summarily dropped by their label, Sub Pop, and the band itself unofficially splintered apart shortly thereafter (with Blag Dahlia setting off to record, of all things, a solo bluegrass album). The Dwarves wouldn’t remain dormant for long though, kicking off the second chapter of their careers in 1997 with their best album yet...
