The Sugarcubes: Life's Too Good [ONE LITTLE INDIAN]

Why you'll love it

This One Little Indian reissue brings back the album that put Reykjavík on the indie map. "Birthday" was an NME Single of the Week and a hit on American college radio before crossing over to mainstream stations.

About the album

The Sugarcubes were veterans of Reykjavík's early 80s post-punk scene who set out to make a humorous take on pop music's optimism, hence the title, and never intended to be taken seriously. Then Derek Birkett's One Little Indian put out "Birthday" in August 1987, and the joke got away from them. The British music press piled in, major labels came calling, and the band turned them down to keep creative control, making the album themselves.

Björk's voice is the thing everyone noticed, swooping from a whisper to a howl, with Einar Örn's trumpet and yelps as her foil. "Coldsweat" and "Deus" came out as singles ahead of the album, "Motorcrash" followed in November 1988, and "Traitor," "Delicious Demon" and "Mama" fill out a record that twists post-punk, jazz and folk into strange, bright pop. Paul White of Me Company designed the sleeve, with flat-colour backgrounds that also kept printing costs down.

Life's Too Good is credited as the first Icelandic album of its kind to make a worldwide impact, and it set Björk up for her solo career. NME's Steven Wells scored it fifty out of ten, which is the sort of maths we'd quite like applied to our staff reviews.

Also at Kops: more The Sugarcubes on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On One Little Indian (cat# tplp5r), a reissue of the 1988 album.