DESCRIPTION:
Winter Family: Red Sugar (2011).Winter Family are a duo, and their music is as black as the cover of their self-titled 2007 debut. Even when they use humor and irony, the material shades dark.Winter Family's songs are are "heavy" in every sense of the word, to the point where they sometimes threaten to become claustrophobic. And their second full-length, Red Sugar, is, if anything, even more bleak than its predecessor. But they also have a way of leavening the nightmare with glimmers of beauty, just enough to keep the music from getting too oppressive.The songs on Red Sugar tend to alternate moments of everyday life-- lovers falling into open arms, the sound of families getting drunk, birds shaking the water off their bodies, cats asleep in arms-- with impressionistic images of war and pain. You get the feeling of small lives being lived as a larger world of misery rages outside .pitchfork