This Icelandic band is where Björk (Guðmundsdóttir) makes her debut, providing her unmistakeable vocal style alongside Einar Örn Benediktsson. They sound a little like the quirkier CBGB graduates such as Talking Heads and B-52s, especially on the track Delicious Demon (and some of the bonus tracks like Dragon) with Benediktsson’s vocals sounding a bit like The B-52's Fred Schneider and and Björk’s backing utterances and screams not unlike Kate Pierson. This is probably deliberate, as The Sugarcubes set out to make something fun and not serious. The music is still good though, if lyrically bizarre.
Motorcrash, for example, has Björk’s character riding her bike and seeing a “terrible motorcrash” before taking the injured mother home and nursing her. We switch point of view to Einar who follows the girl because she seems to be following accidents around. There is no reason or conclusion to the oddity, which is great – the implication seems to be that she’s seeking, or causing, car crashes in order to comfort the victims.
Or that she’s just weird. But here Björk’s experimental style is nascent at best, and even compared to later Sugarcubes tracks, like the scratch-inspired Hit the music itself is fun but nothing too scarily unusual. The intent was to create music that was fun to listen to, and they do that in spades.
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