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Critic's Review
Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
The original Sugar & Spice was a pleasant, if not too ambitious artifact from the early days of the Merseybeat explosion, appearing in late 1963 at the same time that the Beatles were writing a new musical history -- on the other hand, the mere fact of its being the second of five original studio albums by the Searchers is pretty impressive, when one considers that such top-selling EMI acts of the same era as Gerry & The Pacemakers and the Dave Clark Five, never got to do anywhere near five LPs in England. The 2003 reissue from Japanese Victor utilizes state-of-the-art 24-bit masters, very close -- if not identical -- to those on the 2001 CDs from Castle Communications in England. Castle's remastering brings out the lyricism in the group's singing and playing, as well as whatever hard edge their was to their sound, moving the group's presence about as close as it was possible to do. The philosophy behind the bonus tracks on this CD was very different from its British counterpart, however -- instead of doubling up the stereo and mono mixes of the album, the producers have thrown on the chronologically related single "Saturday Night Out," the French- and German-language versions of "Sugar and Spice," the French version of "Saints and Searchers," and an originally unreleased rendition of "Bye Bye Johnny." Then they appended ten songs from the group's spring 1964 live appearance on Swedish radio, a fairly hard-rocking body of music which included new renditions of three songs from this album, as well as the singles "Farmer John," "Sweets For My Sweet," and "Needles And Pins." It all holds together well, and avoids the problem of repetition entirely -- indeed, the instrumental track for the French version of "Sugar And Spice" is distinctly different from the one used on the domestic U.K. and U.S. releases, and both foreign releases are interesting enough to make them worth hearing.
