Band:	Sugar Wounds
Album:	Calico Dreams
Style:	Screamo, Shoegaze, Grindcore
Release date:	March 2021

01. Every Color
02. Calico Dreams
03. Combat Wombat
04. Semi-Burnt Sugar
05. I Quit
06. Kneading Neatly Is Mari's Nightly Norm
07. Goodnight, Midnight

"Sugar Wounds" is such an ideal name for this band; they're delectably saccharine, but they'll puncture your ears without mercy.

Bandcamp recommends this if you like Alcest. I recommend this if you like Alcest chopped up, fed through a lawnmower, and interrupted by frequent headaches. Sugar Wounds has a comparable instinct for elegant composition and evocative soundscapes, though this instinct incarnates merely in flavorful etudes that explode into brightly colored confetti marred by jarring electronic effects; rushing through seven tracks in a scant 23 minutes, with the final piece taking up a full third of the album's run by itself, Calico Dreams has not the time to waste harvesting atmosphere in the manner of its peers. It often eschews the oneiric contentment derived from the blur-cushioned black metal that has become the basis for much metalgaze, instead concentrating on bridging the gap between that style and the gaudy, ultra-bright grind that has made Psudoku and Chepang into household migraines.

At times, the layers of tremolo-picked leads and slack chords mesh into calming echoes, and the spitting shrieks can easily distort into a similar wavelength, but this is not the relaxing variety of metalgaze - the percussion is detached from this cloud of (relatively) soft sounds. The drums remain distinct and forceful, explicitly pushing the pace and making the blastbeats felt instead of merging with the other instruments for a cohesive sound; violent fills and double-bass make this a grindcore album from the rhythm section's perspective. Moreover, those guitars are just as often squealing and scraping with equal glee, bursting with starship sound effects and harmonic-infected noodling. The album never quite enters the realm of glitch, but some of the riffs do feel like they're "stuck" in a loop a la Melt-Banana (whom the springy bass also calls to mind), and while the songs are never "atmospheric" for more than a few seconds at a time, that's usually long enough to pull out some of the somnolent soundscapes that characterize metalgaze.

For that reason, Calico Dreams actually sounds a little softer and more polished than the first album, Mechanical Friends - the brightness of that album was even more distorted and extreme, framed like a willful attack on your eardrums, while this album's production allows the calmer sections to take better hold and soothe the senses, however momentarily. The capacity for more textural diversity makes Calico Dreams a subtler album, more mindful of (and amused by) the tension between demands for active and passive listening. At its most conventional, Sugar Wounds passes for a hardcore band that has enough energy to thrash around angrily but listens to enough shoegaze to try some upper-string chord phrasings instead of brutal chugs - delicate and thoughtful, but with intense and unpredictable drumming, as if somebody uncrippled the children of An Autumn For Crippled Children and let them go nuts. For me, though, the most exciting parts of this album are those times when I start seeing flashes of bright purple and yellow and I feel like a ray gun has been fired directly into my neurons. It may be, then, that I prefer Mechanical Friends, as I appreciate the audacity of almost-unlistenable annoying-grind more than I enjoy hyperactive atmosphere, but the differences between these two albums are really that of a split handful of hairs. If Melt-Banana won't come back to the studio, then this is where I will spend my time getting my head split open by screeching riffs and buffalo stampedes of percussion.