REVIEW: Sugar Plant, After After Hours (World Domination)

- Tim Mohr

The promise of late night atmosphere in the album title of Sugar Plant's debut is kept with Mazzy Star styled laments and a cohesive flow of hushed melancholy. The Japanese duo have recorded a pre-dawn soundtrack to rival any of the past masters of the genre, from Galaxie 500 to Mojave 3.

The record opens with a bubbling electronic ambient overture before launching, gently, into the slow, acoustic-based sound and breathy female vocals that characterize these hymns to loneliness and longing crafted in sometimes awkward yet poignant English verses.

On the second song, "4," Chinatsu and Shin'ichi sing, "you don't know how much cold my limb is/do you make me warm in your wings?/I wish you to see the stars in my mind/and do you make me warm?"

Sugar Plant's arrangements feature bits of vintage keyboards, electric guitar, and antiquated synth gurgles, but rest largely upon simple frameworks. Sometimes, as on "Behind The Door," Sugar Plant add layers of guitar psychedelia that point towards Galaxie 500 or the more subdued moments of My Bloody Valentine. A sense of tarnished majesty builds in songs such as "drifting" that can also be compared to Suede's ballads, "Breakdown" or "Saturday Night."

In an ode to the wee hours, "I Hate Morning," they sing, "pale blue light is my friend/where is my quiet bed?/heavy head makes me down so down/I hate morning."

Sugar Plant sound like the Mazzy Star of the future: each Mazzy Star album has moved further from the country psychedelia of Opal, the band from which Mazzy Star developed. Sugar Plant have no connection to any heritage like that, and are therefore free to reproduce the feel without the specific form. The result is a spacey melancholia that seems to float on its own, perhaps expressing contemporary uneasiness even more accurately because of the untethered musical approach. The debilitating, dry heat of Mazzy Star's desert landscape is here approximated in a cold, rainy climate that is harder to identify but that proves equally compelling.