Sugar Plant

After After Hours (World Domination)
by Nik Rainey

The ongoing jones for Japacious jingle-jangle is, at bottom, just another symptom of the Irony Epidemic that’s run rampant through North America for upwards of a decade now, not to mention more than a little xenophobic. Could be residual WWII hostility or merely our petty revenge for the Orient’s uncontested supremacy in the world market (even our All-American punk rock is subsidized by Sony), or it could just be the fact that we find foreigners funny (’cause they’re just so, you know, foreign), but regardless of reasons, our applause for those Rising Sons and Daughters who come over to share their sounds with us and give back a little of what the West has given them hides an undercurrent of condescension. Just ’cause they’re shorter than us is no reason to pat them on the head.

I don’t know how Sugar Plant managed to slip past security (“okay, the cute and noisy ones can go right through. The rest of you will have to wait.”), but it’s sheer tonic for me that they did. This band doesn’t fit onto the bill at the Slit-Eyed Minstrel Show like most of the others do – for all the samples, electronics, and maladroit English lyrics that edge into poetry (“I know everyone won’t be killed/ suddenly by thunder/ but I like it so much”), they’re a peg that fits snugly into the cartography laid out by the third Velvets album (amazing how Lou Reed’s temporary speed withdrawal in late ’68 ended up kickstarting a whole sub-genre), soft, plaintive, and with a camp reading of absolute zero. It’s got modern juice running through its circuits, no question, but every ohm is aimed at a functioning human heart. Soft, sincere, and as beautiful as a lotus in full Technicolor bloom, After After Hours bursts effulgently free from the West-imposed Asian rut.