Sugar Horse – The Grand Scheme of Things (Review)

This is the second album from UK doomgaze band Sugar Horse.

The Grand Scheme of Things contains an hour of idiosyncratic and expressive music. The style overall can be thought of as doomgaze, although it has a variety of ingredients, including indie, shoegaze, sludge, doom, drone, and post-rock/metal.

Sugar Horse have been making waves with their interesting and engaging take on heavy music for a while now, and The Grand Scheme of Things lives up to their reputation, albeit with a slight change in direction. The record offers up a diverse soundscape filled with different sights and sounds for the listener to explore. There’s a lot going on, from the light and airy, to the crushingly sublime.

Melancholic, richly emotive, and with a broad atmospheric scope, the songs are great examples of a band taking their multiple influences and forging the into a distinct sound. It’s less heavy, less metal than some of Sugar Horse’s previous work, and instead focuses on their melodic, atmospheric, song-based side more, (although the heavier aspect of the band certainly isn’t absent, but the screaming and heavy riffs don’t actually appear until track four, Mulletproof, for example). Most of the songs are relatively short and concise too, with the notable exception of the colossal final track, Space Tourist, (more on this later).

The Grand Scheme of Things is an album of great beauty, one infused with sadness and melancholy. There are bright rays of hope seeded throughout, yet these are ultimately deeply entwined with the despondency. Somewhat paradoxically, this helps to ensure something arises that is greater than the sum of its parts, succeeding in enriching the music with its layered levels of jaded shading.

Sugar Horse are a versatile and inventive band, and they have effectively channelled their creativity into an extremely enjoyable record. It’s multifaceted and diverse, and well-constructed, flowing well from song to songs across its meaty running time.

The only fly in the ointment is the aforementioned final track Space Tourist.  It reminds me of the 90s when there was an unforgivable trend for bands putting like 20 minutes of silence at the end of their CDs before finishing with a pointless bit of noise or whatever after that. Space Tourist is not actually as awful as that old habit used to be though, to be fair – the actual song itself, (roughly four minutes), is as good as anything else here, but unfortunately after that the majority of the song, (roughly 20 minutes), is a very gradually building drone piece. This is actually really good for what it is, to be honest, but what it is dulls the impact of the rest of the album, is too long by far, and in my humble opinion could have done with being edited out of this record and put somewhere else on another release by itself. Oh well, can’t have everything I suppose.

Ignoring this misstep, Sugar Horse have nonetheless still impressed. Despite having many hooks during the actual songs, it’s an album that works best holistically and over time. So sit back, dive into the band’s evocative world, and prepare to become obsessed with The Grand Scheme of Things, (or at least about 40 minutes of it).