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Here we have it fans, long running and newcomers alike. The ultimate in records by the almighty Brown Sugar. Almost ten years after the band formed Feral Kid Records now presents to you this experience of a collection LP compiling all tracks from the bands singles and compilations, as well as the unreleased 7th single, unreleased tracks, songs from the 'Songs About Birds' demo, and more. Essentially everything that the band ever did aside from the powerhouse LP also released by Feral Kid Records
Our take: Man, I was just searching the Sorry State site to see what I had written about Brown Sugar in the past, and I was surprised to find that there hasn’t been a single Brown Sugar release for sale on the current version of the Sorry State site. Has it really been six years since Brown Sugar broke up? I would have sworn it was only 2, maybe 3 years ago. Beyond just the whole “time flying” cliche, it’s particularly interesting that Brown Sugar’s heyday was nearly a decade ago, because that’s pretty much the deepest trough in the “pop culture life cycle.” In other words, shit that happened ten years ago is generally seen as super uncool (the 80s were super lame in the 90s, the 90s were super uncool in the 00s, and so on as long as there is a popular culture). However, Brown Sugar seem really, really cool in the year 2018, all the more so because they were doing something that was so cool and inventive back when most of us were at band practice trying and failing to rip off the Mecht Mensch EP. Brown Sugar had a little bit of that in their sound for sure, but they also had a lot of other stuff as well, and their musical eclecticism would foreshadow (or maybe even influence?) all of the weird, quirky punk of today, particularly stuff from the Coneheads / Liquids / Lumpy & the Dumpers universe of bands. This collection starts off with a cover of “Hey Joe,” one of the band’s earliest recordings, and it’s telling. For some reason I always thought of Brown Sugar as a hardcore band who got kind of weird toward the end, but the very fact that they did “Hey Joe” at the very beginning shows that they were looking at hardcore way, way differently than most bands were in the 2008 heyday of the No Way Records era. Over the course of this compilation (which encompasses just about everything the band did save the Sings of Birds and Racism LP) they get better at incorporating their unique stew of influences into their faster, more hardcore tracks, but it’s amazing how much of that was there right at the very beginning. Anyway, there’s so much here that it doesn’t really make sense to go through it all bit by bit (and the liner notes do a pretty killer job of that anyway, albeit through a similarly fractured lens as the music), but it all sounds really, really great today. This band was clearly way, way ahead of their time, and it’s awesome that they finally seem to be getting the recognition they deserve. Now, let’s see a repress of the LP!