STOP: I Highly Recommend That You LISTEN TO ME Read You This Review. The MEDIA PLAYER Is Located Near The Bottom Of The Review, Before The Links. Enjoy!
Album: Primary Colours
Artist: The Horrors
Genre: Death/Shoegazer Rock
Year: 2009
Label: XL
The Horrors seem to have the world in the palm of their hand. Critics love them (NME, Drowned In Sound;) they’ve got cult-like followers and the admiration of elder statesmen of the music world (Geoff Barrow, Trent Reznor). On top of that they’ve got a great sound, chock full of gothic darkness and shoegazy textures and, as if that weren’t enough, they’re young, having only existed for four years. All of that is fairly respectable and makes me wonder what’s wrong with this picture. But even I’m quashing my inner cynic for this one, because, ultimately, I like The Horrors. Sure they’re not my favorite band in the world, but I’ve found this album, Primary Colours, strangely addictive and fun to listen to and since anyone worth their salt would need more convincing than that, I’ll take you on a tour as best I can.
We are living in an era of Post-Punk revivalism, as clearly demonstrated by bands like Interpol (Joy Division,) Bloc Party (Gang Of Four, whether they like it or not,) Romance (Sisters Of Mercy AND Gang Of Four) and now, The Horrors who don’t so much revive Post-Punk as they break into the graveyard where it’s buried, unearth the coffin and make off with it into the night. They then take the corpse down to the lab, where, using a mixture of dark science and a borderline unhealthy dose of guitar feedback, they resurrect Post-Punk. Then, they begin to begin to tinker with it.
The Horror’s sound is not unique by any means, but it is a fun amalgam of what has come before, in this case Gothic Rock mixed with Shoegazer. The darkness of the sound and the lyrical themes recall Goth at it’s best, but the guitars and synths come from the My Bloody Valentine side of the park. As with MBV, The Horror’s guitars and synths are all about the texture. They want you to not so much hear the sound, as they want you to feel it. And you do. Listening to (and feeling) the music is sort of like being immersed in shimmering waves of darkness and light that warp and twist around you like smoke in the wind.
The darkness is not oppressive, however, and unlike My Bloody Valentine, whose guitar waves threaten to drown you, The Horrors seem to understand restraint. Or, more accurately, Geoff Barrow (of Portishead) knows how to restrain them. In his role as producer, Barrow seems to have allowed The Horrors to blossom into a dark flower, that only here and there needs trimming. From what I understand about their relationship, Barrow’s job was to reign in The Horrors when they took something too far, rather then to help shape their sound. Ultimately, Barrow’s greatest contribution to the album may be that his stamp of approval is one of the things that convinced me to pick it up.
The problem with The Horrors first album, Strange House, with the exception of their cover of the Screaming Lord Sutch song “Jack The Ripper,” was that none of the songs were particularly memorable and the band’s choice of influences to display made them sound like a bad combination of Christian Death and the Ramones. It would be fine to try and combine those two, but the overall effect of Strange House was one of monotony. Primary Colours is a welcome change in that all the songs manage to sound different from one another and Faris Badwan, the band’s vocalist, has, for the most part, dropped the horrible scream he employed on so much of Strange House in favor of a more varied delivery. His voice is a gothic drone on the epic love song “I Only Think Of You,” an agonized bark on the deranged “New Ice Age” and a dream-like mutter on the synthesized wash of “Scarlet Fields.” All of these voices are still noticeably Badwan though, and that’s a good thing.
There are a lot of great cuts on Primary Colours. All the songs I’ve previously mentioned are good ones but my personal favorite is the dark spiral of “I Can’t Control Myself” which sounds like the band on a ship, sliding and slipping on the wet deck as they try to cling both aboard and to their own sanity. Another excellent cut is the eight minute closer “Sea Within A Sea” which apes the atmospherics of Joy Division and the synthesized shadows of Suicide and combines them into one of the Horrors’ best songs and a great way to close out the album.
Sadly, this album is not a perfect masterwork and is, rather incredibly, nearly done in by a single track. That track is the third song on the album: “Who Can Say” which begins as a simple apology song to an ex-girlfriend, but during the bridge I nearly lost my shit. The music mostly stops, except for the drums and a distorted guitar line. Over this Faris Badwan speaks “and when I told her I didn’t love her anymore, she cried” and then “and when I told her that her kisses were not like before, she cried” and continues “and when I told her another girl had caught my eye, she cried” and finally “and then I kissed her with a kiss that could only mean goodbye.” Then the music starts back up again like nothing ever happened. My description isn’t going to do it justice; you’ll have to hear it to fully understand just how pretentious he sounds when he does this. He doesn’t sing it, he speaks it and there’s an echo effect on his voice. It sounds abominably insincere and makes you want to gag. It is with this song that I’m reminded of how ridiculous this band can be. I really hope that they weren’t taking themselves seriously with “Who Can Say” because if they were, that’s cause for alarm.
But overall, Primary Colours is still a great album chock full of great songs. It is thus far the band’s best work and it stands up to repeated listens, which goes along way towards The Horrors being more than a flash in the pan. Just please, for the love of god, skip “Who Can Say.” This album would have worked just fine without it and you’re not missing anything (except maybe some cringing) by not listening to it.
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Any band that plays a song called "Jack the Ripper" is cool in my book. I'm definitely gonna check them out.
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