Sweet Tooth
Twenty-two songs about sugar — the food group pop can’t stop singing about. Candy and cream and cotton and cake, lollipops and Savoy truffles and someone leaving the cake out in the rain. Some of it is literal; some of it is bands who simply had the good sense to name themselves Sweet, Cream, and Cake. All of it will rot your teeth.
A Feast, and the Ants Beneath
The bench runs global and deep: a Cambodian golden-age ballad, ABBA in Swedish, Kirka under a Finnish cinnamon tree, Gainsbourg’s scandalous lollipops, Udo Jürgens waltzing toward death-by-cream. The band-name jokes assemble themselves — the Ballroom Blitz from Sweet, Sunshine of Your Love from Cream, Short Skirt / Long Jacket from CAKE — and Def Leppard pour some sugar on the whole thing with a full orchestra.
The label brings dessert too: Sylvaine Éternelle’s “Fondant,” warm French electronica that melts exactly the way it’s named. And it closes on the oldest lesson in the confectioner’s book — Bow Wow Wow wanting candy, feral and immediate, answered by the Rolling Stones (whose Let It Bleed sleeve is, of course, a cake): you can’t always get what you want.
Play it before the dentist. Not after.
Pairs well with a sugar high, a filling that’s about to go, and the third slice you swore you wouldn’t.
