Sugarcubes: The Show Wasn't All Sweet

The Sugarcubes, last night at Moore Theater.

The Jetsons dress was a dead giveaway.

The Sugarcubes, the Icelandic band that made its debut at the Moore Theater last night, were eccentric by almost anyone's definition.

The members' clothes were more inspired by bad television reruns than fashion knowledge, the in-between song banter was mostly train-of-thought weirdness and the stage was done up in a gaudy mix of bright lights, mirrors, and continuously-spewing bubble machines.

The crowd found it all a bit hard to swallow at first. Einar Orn, the more obnoxious of the group's two singers, detracted from the first few songs rather than adding to them. His reputation of dominating in a live situation has led more than one critic to hound him in the press, since most of the Sugarcubes' appeal lies in the vocal gymnastics of female singer Bjork Gudmundsottir.

But once the singers settled into a comfortable rhythm, they equally worked off each other's vocal cues to pump new life into the show.

As the crowd loosened up, so did the band, with its behavior escalating into new levels of eccentricity with each song. These theatrics included Einar's falsetto mimicry of Bjork, trumpet playing, obnoxious harmonica noises, Einar and Bjork doing bee impersonations across the stage, Einar performing from halfway up the aisle on the main floor, and child-like approximations of Icelandic disco dancing.

All of this behavior, however, was merely adornment structured around a fairly solid set of material. The material on its latest album, ``Here Today, Tomorrow, Next Week,'' is structurally much weaker than on its debut album, ``Life's Too Good,'' and fortunately the earlier album was far from ignored. But what critics miss when terming the album ``bad disco'' is that the Sugarcubes are becoming more light-hearted, and this frivolity reflected on old as well as new songs. The clearest example of this was on ``Delicious Demon,'' one of the encore songs, where the waif-like Bjork scampered offstage to bring back a guitar. Her playing was, well, what you might expect from an 8-year old, but the charm factor was immeasurable.

On the down side of the evening, The Primitives, the British band opening the show, did little to instill excitement into most of the crowd. Tracy Tracy, who was spotlighted for nearly the entire show, did nothing especially meriting the attention. The musicians in the band, who handled most of the backing vocals and a few lead spots, actually sang better than Tracy.