New release for Sugar Horse.
Three years after their debut album, the Pelagic Records-signed band featuring Ashley Tubb (guitar/vocals), Chris Howarth (bass/piano), Jake Healy (guitar/keyboards) and Martin Savage (drums) announce the release of The Grand Scheme of Things.
The album kicks off with The Grand Scheme Of Things, the eponymous title track, which welcomes us into a softness quickly tinged with soaring but intriguing sounds. Vocals join the mix, which eventually builds to a heady saturation that slowly transports us to The Shape Of ASMR To Come, which provides a logical sonic continuity before the soothing break. The rhythm intensifies once more, drawing the vocal parts into their progressive blaze, before Corpsing again reveals soothing, airy tones before tinting them with an abrasive veil that contrasts with the quietude of the base. Reverberation and foggy sounds return with Mulletproof, where we feel the wisps wandering in the background, but screams disturb the quietude before it shatters with an imposing saturation. Spit Beach makes us return to a luminous quietude and its hypnotic clean voice, but the rhythm is once again disturbed by a heavier, jerky approach that gradually becomes terrifying until it runs out of steam, letting New Dead Elvis develop a kind of mysterious darkness. Riffs flare up from time to time, followed by bursts of vocals, before Jefferson Aeroplane Over The Sea envelops us in its ethereal atmosphere, taking advantage of a clever wordplay. The more suffocating saturated parts remain fairly calm, but this is not the case on Office Job Simulator, where greasy Stoner influences thicken the mix before moving into more unstructured, dissonant patterns.
The band had accustomed us to rather long tracks on their previous album, but Space Tourist surpasses all records with a rather relaxing start, letting the keyboards lull us before intensifying the rhythm and then adopting oppressive Sludge accents, then it’s on to twenty minutes of experimental and impenetrable sound where the few melodies struggle to emerge, finally letting themselves die.
If the second half of this new album is rather unexpected and difficult to access, the other eight compositions on The Grand Scheme of Things are easy to take in. Sugar Horse is a band that knows how to manage its ambience perfectly, making it as soaring or terrifying as it pleases.
90/100