The Horrors – Primary Colours
XL
In retrospect we should have seen it coming. After all, the advent of Spider And The Flies – a side project pursued by Tomethy Furse and Rhys Webb – served notice that The Horrors’ inspirations stretched far beyond sixties novelty garage rock records. Yet nothing could fully prepare you for Primary Colours and the sonic overhaul that comes with it.
The Horrors are still a ‘record collection rock’ band who wear their influences on their perfectly cut sleeves, but this second album draws on very different eras than did their debut, Strange House. Plainly, there has been an embrace of krautrock – particularly Neu!, who cast a long shadow over pulsing eight-minute comeback single ‘Sea Within A Sea’. A more esoteric genre, namely Swiss post punk, is tapped within ‘Scarlet Fields’, which seems a straightforward rewrite of Grauzone’s hypnotic 1981 single ‘Eisbaer’.
Equally surprising references pitch up elsewhere. ‘I Can’t Control Myself’ is a close cousin of Spiritualized’s ‘Come Together’, while the vocal running through the fearsome ‘New Ice Age’ evokes The Fall’s ‘Psycho Mafia’. Yet the most striking sonic shift comes courtesy of guitarist Joshua Third, who appears to have raided My Bloody Valentine’s stash of effects pedals. The shoe-gazing likes of ‘Mirror’s Image’ and ‘Three Decades’ are awash with reverberation and backward tracking.
Beyond an expansion of The Horrors’ musical range – guided by characteristically excellent taste – this album brings with it a dramatic shift in tone. Where The Horrors once made music of intentional trashiness, they now sound epic and questing, while there’s a new strain of romanticism running through Faris Badwan’s lyrics (particularly in ‘Do You Remember’ and ‘I Only Think Of You’). A new fearlessness is at work, too: Badwan’s words are no longer muffled and fantastical, but emotional and distinct. Clearly, Third is not the only member who’s upped his game: the suddenly confident Badwan actually sings many of the songs here, rather than merely bellowing them.
When Loog/Universal dropped The Horrors two years ago, ill-deserved obscurity seemed to loom. The band’s response, we now learn, was to simply improve. We should have seen it coming, but it’s still worth celebrating. Niall O’Keffee
