Album Review: Sugar Horse - The Grand Scheme Of Things
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
It was Hardbeat magazine citing The Live Long After as the second-best album of 2021 which first put Sugar Horse on my radar. The band’s debut was a genre-hopping combination of doomy shoegaze and epic post metal, blending in a myriad of other styles, layered with such song titles as Shouting Judas at Bob Dylan, Dadcore World Cup and Fat Dracula, to name but a few.
I was lucky enough to catch the Bristol quartet at the Uprising Festival back in May when they damn-near destroyed the Academy 3 with the sheer weight of their set; and I expect the same to happen at the Bowler’s next month, when they play Damnation’s Night of Salvation show.
Before that, and on the heels of a couple of stop-gap releases, Sugar Horse is about to issue its sophomore record, The Grand Scheme of Things.
Where The Live Long After played with the ideas of switching genres, this new album is built on the shifting sands of constant forward development. This is a record of duality – where everything has its opposite: from the uplifting passages of Jefferson Aeroplane Over the Sea, to the dense, unbelievable weight of Mulletproof. Though, as you can probably see, the unusual song titles are still in evidence.
The title track starts things with a slow, measured guitar, revealing a post rock aesthetic, against which lush, haunting melodies and whispered vocals mesmerise. Here, as elsewhere on this record, singer, Ash Tubb seems to conjure the spirit of Anathema’s Vincent Cavanagh, offering the same level of melancholia, while also manage to elevate the lyric, and soar.
The Shape of ASMR to Come picks up where its predecessor left off, a trope familiar across the album, allowing the collection to have the feel of a single composition, divided into nine movements. Leaning more heavily into the Shoegaze aspects, it explores a melancholic, almost devotional, side.
But for every contemplative moment, there’s a Yang to that Yin, and Sugar Horse are as adept at the heavy as they are at the smooth. While the aforementioned Mulletproof might open with s stark chord and a whispered vocal and may evoke images of the vastness of the cosmos, it takes but the briefest of seconds for crashing drums and a scream to break the spell, dragging the listener into a musical melee as aggressive and uncompromising as anything Cult of Luna or Neurosis have ever dared unleash.
Split Beach opens with some Marillion-like keys, but quickly descends from the post rock to the post metal, drawn down by the repetitive guitar lines of Ash and Jake Healy in one of his dual roles within the band. Jake’s keys underscore the folk feel of Jefferson Aeroplane Over the Sea, lending it a light and airy feel, as though buoyed up as the instrumentation swirl and eddy. Whether a deliberate choice from the band, but the earlier Corpsing, with its mournful nature, has something of a watery feel, as its climax evokes the image of waves breaking on a stoney beach.
The closing duo of Office Job Simulator and Space Tourist link through the outro of the first becoming the intro to the latter. The heavy sections of Office Job… have the feel of Seventies Occult rock and the discordant elements, while echoing the earlier New Dead Elvis, throw a real curveball so late on in the piece.
Alternately, Space Tourist uses the melodic coda of Office Job Simulator to build a sumptuous post rock edifice, complete with clean vocals and guitar, offering the listener the possibility of hope and a positive ending. The uplifting is brought to a swift close by the introduction of guttural vocals and destructive post metal rhythms, pushing this final track into an additional twenty minutes of
feedback and drone. Halfway through, the drone splits until two competing variations challenge each other for supremacy. It’s oddly compelling, but I listen to Sunn O))), so maybe consider that before sitting down to the full twenty-minute experience.
Musically, The Grand Scheme of Things is faultless; Tub and Healy have the high end sorted, leaving Chris Howarth and drummer, Martin Savage to create a solid platform to keep it standing tall.
This is an album of contradictions: of light and shade, of pain and joy, of delicately soaring and the gravity-affecting weight. It’s in constant conflict with itself and Sugar Horse are the puppeteers, pulling the strings. A real treat from start to finish (even the drone section at the end).
