Live Review: Sugar Horse and Dead Bird | Dareshack, Bristol | 04/05/2023
Seemingly casting the first rains in days on their own accord, Dead Bird and Sugar Horse treat Dareshack to a fine evening of bleak post-screamo and even bleaker doomgaze.
Dead Bird
As the skies cloud over and first drizzle in days begin to fall over a now dismal Bristol, it seems this evening is the perfect setting for Dead Bird. After all, inviting spring skies are not a setting one would associated with this band, something anyone who heard their debut In The Absence Of would attest to. But still, even after outpouring a lifetime’s amount of emotion with their brilliant said debut, it’s clear Dead Bird have more to expunge, a fact that they present viscerally and painstakingly with a set composed purely of new material.
In a manner that truly portrays the constant and fluid flux of one’s fractured and warped headspace, such new material is presented in a fashion that’s mentally flaying and utterly undeniable. Whilst a post-screamo foundation serves as the foundation of their sound, Dead Bird’s set skirts boundlessly from periods of stillness – where the most prominent sounds are the physical clicking of pedals – to titanous post metal riffs and even blackgaze passages entirely absent from their previous work. Yet whilst their sound harkens thoughts of a wide berth of artists including the likes of Envy, Yearning, Suffocate For Fucks Sake, Russian Circles and even Glassjaw at times, their sound is still firmly embedded in a state of grief and anguish. Much like those emotions, ones that Dead Bird exist to animate and expunge from their collective mental state, their craft is impossible to pin down but yet entirely cathartic in the way it channels authentic pain. It’s a thunderous set, one the band quite literally being to the floor, and whilst their aforementioned debut may have been released somewhat without fanfare and unceremoniously last year, it’s damn well clear that Dead Bird will be swarming all with the thunderous new content they’ve premiered here tonight later in the hopefully near future.
Score: 8/10
Sugar Horse
Opening with the viola led instrumental that has become known to herald their live shows – something that sounds not entirely unlike a soundtrack for a formal suicide pact aboard the Titanic prior to it hitting an iceberg – Sugar Horse gently ease Dareshack into their set in the same way a sadist would ease someone into tinnitus with 200db of sudden white noise as they lurch into the blissful fatalism of ‘Phil Spector In Hell’. However, whilst the sheer volume of their glacial doom-laden shoegaze would typically send punters either reaching for ear protection or out the door completely, tonight not a single person is taken aback. Such a lack of reaction or shock is to be expected given the circumstances though. Even amidst a musical community nationally known for it’s ingenuity and originality, Sugar Horse occupy a special place within the local scene here, and from quickly scanning the faces of those in attendance, it’s clear that the vast majority of those gathered have seen the band in some capacity in our around the South West previously. But even with the populace gathered well versed in the band’s bleak and miserable ways, that’s not to say that this hometown show isn’t without it’s surprises.
Gliding through their more mollifying tracks such as ‘Super Army Soldiers’ and ‘Pictures Of Dogs Having Sex’ – a song that’s far more ethereal and beautiful than it’s namesake suggests, really – prior to dropping into the hulking ‘Thrash Music’, Sugar Horse once again offer a wonderful if not raw masterclass in genre dynamism. As weighted textures of dense nihilism intertwine with serene shoegaze and barbed riffs, tonight once again is a firm reminder that Sugar Horse forgo the dated and contrived notion of genre in a matter brilliantly cohesive, a fact they establish with full conviction with select cuts from their LP debut in the form of ‘Fat Dracula’ and ‘The Live Long After’. These tracks may still deliver the full impact of their mercurial contents as much as they did when they where first released back in 2021 – and still sound colossal live – but truthfully, the best and most surprising arc of this brilliant set is what follows.
As the band tear into their cover of the 1985 New Wave defining classic ‘Head Over Heels’, Sugar Horse finally answer the timeless question that is what would Tears For Fears sound like if they where recorded Songs From The Big Chair in the bowels of Hell. Fleshing out both the perversion of the evocation of the track in a way towering yet far from overt and obnoxious, the cover allows Sugar Horse to flex their creative muscles in a contortion the band have not displayed previously. Still, it’s the closer that’s the true surprise of the evening. Ending on an untitled 15 minute opus of a new song, it’s here where one get’s a glimmer of the band’s forthcoming new act. Sounding biblical in terms of scope and touching upon both ends of Sugar Horse’s musical spectrum – from crushing, all-consuming post metal to wonderfully ominous spaciousness – the new track is a song that just resonates a sense of potent apocalypticism with it’s sense of destruction and wonder. It’s a startling choice for a closer, and as attendees filter out the venue following it, it’s clear we haven’t seen the full extent of Sugar Horse’s musical dynamism as of yet.
Score: 9/10