Review
Genre and Mood
Say Yes Dog’s “Sugar” is synth-pop and electro-pop with an R&B pulse: nostalgic in its sounds, groovy and upbeat in its rhythm. It is one of the songs on the trio’s second album that face the dance floor rather than the stars.
Song Summary
“Sugar” is the seventh of the ten tracks on Voyage, released on 10 May 2019 by Diskodogs Records, and it runs four minutes. The Topic upload names Aaron Ahrends, Pascal Karier and Paul Rundel beside the band and credits Ahrends as producer. Two German reviews of the album picked the song out in a sentence each. Bedroomdisco wrote that Sugar wraps the synths in R’n’B and recalls Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody in its rhythm. soundmag.de named it, with Lies, as an example of the record’s slightly nostalgic aesthetic, made above all by 80s synths and synthetic drums.
Musical Breakdown
No source we found describes “Sugar” from start to finish, so this breakdown stays with the three things the reviews hear in it and in the album around it.
The Synths
The synthesizers carry the 1980s colour that soundmag.de heard across Voyage. MusikBlog called the album’s synths nostalgic too, part of a sound it found smooth and casual.
The Drums
soundmag.de heard synthetic drums in Sugar, although the band, it noted, still plays many analogue instruments on the record, bass, guitars and drums among them.
The Rhythm
The R&B side is in the beat. Bedroomdisco’s comparison with I Wanna Dance With Somebody concerns rhythm, not melody: the pulse of a 1987 dance-pop hit under a synth song from 2019.
Concepts in Focus
A synthesizer can stand for a decade. The sounds soundmag.de heard on Voyage are the ones synth-pop made familiar in the 1980s, and a listener born later can still hear them as nostalgic, because the timbre itself has become a memory.
A drum machine, or drums made to sound like one, gives a song machine-steady time. In Sugar, according to soundmag.de, the drums sound synthetic, and that is a choice for a trio whose drummer, Pascal Karier, plays a real kit. Compare Say Yes Dog – Lies, which the same review named for the same sound.
Artistic Context
Say Yes Dog is Aaron Ahrends on vocals and keyboards, Paul Rundel on bass and Pascal Karier on drums, a German-Luxembourgish trio who met studying at the conservatory in The Hague. Voyage was their second album, four years after Plastic Love. Bedroomdisco described its sound as 80s electro-pop built on minimal arrangements, pulsing rhythms and funky bass; soundmag.de placed it beside Metronomy and Hot Chip.
Impact and Reception
Sugar was not a single. Bedroomdisco found that the album grows monotonous, partly because the vocals hardly leave their range; soundmag.de heard no single stand-out hit but a coherent world of sound. Sugar is one of the places where that world dances. Put it on and listen for the rhythm underneath.
