It makes perfect sense and no sense at all that Beth Ditto’s debut solo album is a pastichey southern rock record. It works because her voice, that raunchy Arkansas holler, was made to embellish Muscle Shoals grooves and electrify honky-tonk barnstormers—a combination that she never quite pulled off with her old band Gossip on their early garage rock albums. But it doesn’t work because why is Beth Ditto, one of the most radical bandleaders of the last decade, turning her hand to a genre safely lagged in schmaltz? That was apparently the point. “I did not wanna make a cool record!” she told DIY. “I always call it a riot grrrl proverb, but it was a slogan: dork equals cool. That changed my fucking life.”
The songs on Fake Sugar were originally intended for another Gossip album, until Ditto’s bandmate Nathan Howdeshell moved back to Arkansas, to her surprise, and she decided to go it alone. Following the demise of her band, the death of her father, and a rocky patch with her wife, she also reconnected with her southern roots. Heading south is a well-worn trope for artists in strife; completing the image, Ditto became obsessed with Graceland on her travels. After auditioning a host of potential producers, she found her match in Grammy-nominated Jennifer Decilveo, who’s mostly worked on pop and R&B records, and a band of session musicians (plus Queens of the Stone Age bassist Michael Shuman).
It’s a shame that Fake Sugar is so slick and professional. It’s often stately where it should bleed, and hokey where it should shred. There are odd production choices: like the noodly British indie guitar parts that cascade through “Savoir Faire” (as if Two Door Cinema Club turned up at the saloon), and total outliers like “Do You Want Me To,” which sounds like a Depeche Mode tribute from a completely different record. “Oo La La” is a lazy, leering garage jam. But soul rock revivalism has been done to death, and despite its predictable structures (tense builds; ripping choruses) Fake Sugar has a few excellent moments. “Fire” is Peggy Lee’s “Fever” with more grit and less patience. “In and Out” pits a mighty verse about being fine with compromising in long-term relationships against a softer chorus where Ditto tries to affirm whether her partner feels the same: “I, I do it for you/You, you do it for me/And we go in and out of love,” she sings anxiously.
Unsurprisingly, it’s Ditto’s boozy yell that lets her pull off this material. She puts poison in the twangy kiss-offs of “Savoir Faire,” and has the charisma to get away with singing lines like “I get so tired of feeling sick and tired” on the title track. There are a few too many power ballads that trade on stretching the word “love” as thin as it goes (“Lover,” “Love in Real Life”), but considering Ditto’s only true vocal competition is probably Adele, you can’t blame her for giving it a shot. She pulls it off on “We Could Run,” the record’s finest moment. It’s a copper-bottomed stadium ballad that builds on cavernous, chiming guitar, and then bursts into an enormous chorus that streaks like lights on a highway.
It’s rare that you get to hear a woman artist lean into such a brawny, fearless song, and Ditto’s perspective elevates Fake Sugar massively. Not only does she use heartland rock to deal with the breakdown of her marriage to a woman, which feels somewhat radical, but the distance she establishes between her self-image and the mess a seemingly unfaithful partner makes of it is quite heartbreaking. Ditto sings proudly about her too-muchness—how she comes on like a storm, this obsessive “firecracker” who “don’t care what anybody thinks of me”—but then in desperation, pledges to hold back. “I’ll never ask too much from you/But oh, I’ll do whatever you want me to,” she promises on “Do You Want Me To.” “Was I not enough?” she worries on “Lover.”
Overlooking the gory betrayals and specifics of identity, Ditto is great at singing about the nuanced trials of long-term love. It makes the album’s direction a little bit easier to comprehend: Fake Sugar is happily middle-aged. It’s hard to know where it fits on U.S. radio, but in the UK, Ditto is almost a household name—she recently appeared on one of the country’s biggest, blandest breakfast radio shows to talk about the record. For all its carefree, uncool origins, it’s hard not to see it as a huge commercial stab—and to wish it well. Ditto’s non-traditional view down a well-trodden path is welcome, but you do wish she’d kick up the dust a bit more.
