Time Capsule: The Sugarcubes, Stick Around For Joy

On June 8th, 1986, Björk Guðmundsdóttir brought two things into this world: her son Sindri and her short lived dance punk band, the Sugarcubes. While they’ve since faded into relative obscurity, they’re arguably still the most notable pre-Sigur Rós band to come out of Iceland. Their third and final record, Stick Around For Joy, scored them their biggest hit, coincidentally titled “Hit,” as well as an opening slot at some U2 gigs during the Dublin band’s heyday. While “Hit” in a vacuum has aged gracefully, the rest of the album is largely a miss. There’s a reason much of this record has not stood the test of time, not to mention being undoubtedly eclipsed by the one-of-a-kind excellence brought upon by Björk’s solo work.

I’m a casual fan of Björk’s and love Vespertine as much as the next micro-bang-donning white girl, but my knowledge of the Sugarcubes has never gone much farther than simply knowing of their existence. Stick Around For Joy has an unignorable achilles heel in co-vocalist Einar Örn. With the exception of his verse on “Hit,” every time I glanced ahead on the Genius page for a track and saw a verse of his was coming up, I braced for impact. His contributions range from absurd to uncomfortable to just plain unserious. At the end of a now archived 2007 profile with Björk for SPIN, the author described this record as sounding like “uninspired B-52’s”—which I would agree with, had Björk not picked up the slack that Einar left behind him.

This is especially the case on the confusing and disjointed track “Lucky Night,” which sounds like something my friends and I would make while tinkering with Logic Pro after taking a 50mg edible. The aggressively unsubtle song about sex feels like the band came up with everything on the fly, especially the inclusion of a melodica playing a caribbean steel drum melody. “To be or not to / Time and logic finally / You must enter my two nostrils / Can that be, or am I just thinking? / Life and death / Glass and water,” Örn delivers with the chutzpah of a Shakespearean soliloquy. On the following “Happy Nurse,” a song about an underpaid nurse resorting to prostitution (complete with an on the nose ambulance siren in the intro), Örn caps off his contribution to the song by saying “Her breast was great and soft / Incredibly great, great and soft / And could squirt, a long way! / A great distance…” with a delivery simultaneously reminiscent of the B-52’s and Run-D.M.C.

Deep cut “Walkabout,” though, may be the record’s best track. Like many other songs on Stick Around, essentially every lyric is an innuendo. (The chorus reads: “There’s a hole and there’s a stick / There’s a cove and there’s a ship / That goes in and out of the Harbor.” Again, Björk and co. are not ones for subtlety on this record). But the instrumental on “Walkabout” particularly doesn’t fall into a rut of redundancy or unfocused oddities that plague much of the record’s back half. The strings and flute flourishes featured are very ABBA-esque, the acoustic guitar arriving light, airy and perfectly imbued in the song’s mix. Additionally, drumming by Sigtryggur Baldursson is impressive in a way that doesn’t swipe the spotlight from Björk’s starring vocal performance. The track is harmless fun, capturing what the Sugarcubes were truly capable of in their best moments.

A similar creative stride is found on the record’s second most popular song, “Leash On Love,” a dance punk epic that finds the entire band on their A-game. Even Einar is pretty charming on this one. Complete with a sleeper pick for a career best vocal performance from Björk (certain ad-libs on this track have her sounding like the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan), she wails diatribes about the universal frustration of being lead on. “He’s a bastard! / You should leave him! / Paranoid manipulator / To hell with him!” she growls atop spacey layered guitars and impressively groovy drumming from Baldursson. The middle of the track transitions from a Talking Heads, Steely Dan-inspired breakdown complete with a healthy dose of cowbell back into the song’s initial motifs with heightened audibility of Braggi Ólaffson’s bass work.

While the Sugarcubes, and Stick Around For Joy along with it, have been historically relegated to a growing pain in what would eventually become Björk’s art pop empire, there is still certainly something to be said about the substance that remains. There’s truly no harm in a bunch of horny twenty-somethings making an album about sexual frustration (with a stray sperm on the cover no less), and if this record’s existence is what allowed for the endless treasure trove that exists as Björk’s discography today, then pass me the melodica.