Pop Music Reviews : Nothing Sweet About Mould’s Sugar

Forget Kurt Cobain, Joey Ramone, Sid Vicious, Madonna and Bart Simpson: Bob Mould’s got more honest-to-badness punk in him than those five combined.

Without resorting to any of the attitude’s usual affectations, Mould and his new band, Sugar, showed Friday at the Palladium what sort of music results from true dis affectation. His approach: a wonderfully raucous mishmash of sounds beholden to no one style, unself-consciously concerned with such topics as drowning a girlfriend and surviving a bout with insanity.

Sugar--the name seems almost a taunt, daring the listener to find anything sweet about the music--shares its orientation with Mould’s ‘80s outfit, Husker Du, which was also a trio shaped by his broad tenor and pinched, brazen guitar playing.

Many of the inspired production and songwriting nuances of Sugar’s debut album, “Copper Blue,” melted away live, casualties of the hacksaw guitar that fueled the show. Mould, for one, wasn’t overly concerned with how the record translated to stage. Though he never said so much as hello or thank-you to the crowd, he thought nothing of stopping one song in the middle to berate the security guards for allegedly handling the moshers too roughly.