EP REVIEW: Waterloo Teeth – Sugar Horse

We’re still not entirely sure this is real. Bristol quartet SUGAR HORSE, a band behind easily one of the best albums of last year in The Live Long After, have enlisted the help of more names than it would be fair to list for their new collaborative EP Waterloo Teeth. It’s no secret that the UK underground has been thriving lately, but here we essentially get a whistle stop tour of many of its most unique and remarkable facets in just a shade under 20 minutes.

While obviously and significantly shorter than the band’s debut full-length, Waterloo Teeth somehow offers similar breadth in just four tracks. Holding it all together – regardless of guests or the record’s many different tones and styles – are the quartet themselves. The band seem to be masters of sludge, hardcore, shoegaze, noise and whatever else takes their fancy at any given moment, but more importantly they pull it off in a manner that avoids feeling like the cobbled-together wankery of many a lesser genre-rejecter. Yes, the Devin Townsend-ian grandeur of closer Super Army Soldiers might be a million miles from the squealing grind-fest of Disco Loadout which opens the record, but taken in full context it makes complete and total sense how we get from one to the other.

Perhaps most telling of SUGAR HORSE’s ability to surprise and subvert is the fact Waterloo Teeth’s most beautiful moment comes in the track laden with nastiest set of guests. Gutted features vocals from Kate Davies of PUPIL SLICER, and vocal and guitar work from three quarters of CONJURER, and while it is often just as tortured and crushing as you’d expect, it also houses a mid-section of striking, dynamic beauty which sees vocalist Ashley Tubb joined by Australian singer-songwriter Nuala Honan as the band evoke the kind of gothy majesty of one of their more obvious influences in THE CURE. It’s a work of stunning juxtaposition, and there’s something similar found in the preceding title track where a moodier, quieter first half gives way to feral, sludgy cacophony replete with some wild saxophone work from Will Gardner of BLACK PEAKS.

That is the overarching triumph here. Waterloo Teeth, like The Live Long After before it, is as good at the serene and the delicate as it is at the apocalyptic and the devastating. Not only that, but it moves from one to the other with such seamless grace that it only ever really jars when that was clearly the band’s intention. Bands this good don’t come around that often, and while SUGAR HORSE are often far too violent to ever really have a shot at the kind of widespread appeal of some of their more legendary influences, if they keep this up we could at least be talking about a group whose music invokes similar adoration from those in the know.

Rating: 9/10

Waterloo Teeth is set for release on October 28th via Small Pond.

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