Here’s the video Sugar released from Beaster, for the song “Tilted.” As much as I love “JC Auto,” as brilliant as I think it is, I’m really glad that this song was the single. With such a uniformly high-quality discography, it’s hard for me sometimes to even contemplate picking a favorite Sugar track. That said, when I’m making mixes for people, and I know they’ve never heard Sugar before, this is the song I always reach for. Even if Beaster is the darker album, “Tilted” is probably more catchy than anything on Copper Blue, and also manages to be heavier than anything on that album too. Its speedy tempo and propulsive guitar riffs make the whole thing incredibly exciting, and that excitement is well-matched with the video’s speedy cuts between live performances and touring footage.
What’s also interesting about the video is that, even as it’s rapidly cutting from one scene to another, it manages to capture the undercurrent that inseparable from the catchy musical velocity of “Tilted.” That undercurrent is alienation; this is, after all, a song about a relationship between two people disintegrating. It’s about the way two people who really care about each other may nonetheless find communication impossible, and become completely disconnected from one another. Maybe to Mould, the alienation of touring is similar to this form of emotional disconnect. Never having been on a long tour, it’s a concept that nonetheless makes a lot of sense to me. The collision of the two metaphors is most apparent about 2:45 in the video: just as Mould finishes singing the line, “You take it out on me,” a water bottle thrown from the crowd hits him right in the face. He’s unaffected, and goes on singing like normal, but the resonance of the moment is impossible to miss, even as the camera cuts rapidly away.
