Description
It’s rather unfair on Bob Mould – a storied and varied artist – but much of the last 20 years of his output has been subject to the Sugar test. It has often come up short. Is Beauty & Ruin, his 11th solo album, as good as Sugar, the feted 90s band Mould fronted after his seminal 80s punk band, Hüsker Dü fell apart? Yes, it is, if you miss the churning post-hardcore melodics of old, a sound that Mould struggled to outgrow before re-embracing it for 2012’s Silver Age. Fast and furious, Kid With Crooked Face and Hey Mr Grey hark right back to Mould’s days in the Dü. As ever, though, reckonings go hand in glove with the riffs and hooks, and the death of Mould’s father in 2012 looms large here.
