All the way back in that marvelous year of 2006 a brand new band was sweeping the battlefield of myspace and infecting Ipods with their shrieking, howling, vomiting, lurid, ghoulishly frightful(and very campy) sound. This band was The Horrors, and while the black-clad, gigantic backcombed haired boys definitely had plenty of that 1977 Punk angst and attitude not to mention enough style to make the Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie jealous, their entire act came off as somewhat of a gimmick. Albeit a very well played gimmick.
Fast forward to the shitacular era of 2009, when the music world is rife with "Art Punkers"(read: late New Ravers) trying to reinvent the wheel that Test Icicles and Klaxons shaped so masterfully, and to reconvene where we left off with The Horrors would certainly feel like they were simply contributing to the death of their credibility and more importantly youth music, but thankfully not so. The Horrors 2009 effort, Primary Colours, is a dark, somber, atmospheric, and most importantly big "FUCK YOU!" to all the people who said The Horrors never had it in 'em.
The album is complete 180 in terms of music, this time taking their cues from Post-Punk bands such as Joy Division, Echo And The Bunnymen, and The Fall to Shoegaze bands like Slowdive, The Verve and My Bloody Valentine and even proto-just-about-every-form-of-electronic-music Kraftwerk. On their previous adventures The Horrors made great use of that Hammond Electric, although it seemed to be in the band more for profiling purposes than creative value. This album, which see's a switch between Bassist Tomethy Furse, and Keyboardist Spider Webb makes complete use of the valued machine, this time however switching from Hammond Organ to either repeater Kraftwerk-ian beats or ethereal walls of sound, a là Slowdive. Gone are the blues driven 3 chord riot riffs and bastardizing approach to music, in favor of effects driven drones, which grow and and morph and engulf like a fire. A very psychedelic fire. Gone too are all of the shrieking fast paced horror-punk lyrics of singer Farris Badwan (neé "Rotter") in favor of a more Ian Curtis like approach, dealing with human emotions such as despair and loss. His low voice drags on ethereally with the soundscape created by the band and it all works wonderfully.
To me The Horrors have always been a quintessential Goth band, and no not the fat-girl-with-tubes-in-her-hair-who-never-had-any-friends-because-she-never-made-herself-even-remotely-appealing-and-whines-about-it-on-her-blogspot-through-so-called-"poetry" Goth; the true traditional Goth of the Batcave venue where the whole of the Goth look and feel meandered from and the music of bands such as Bauhaus, Sisters Of Mercy, Joy Division, The Chameleons and Southern Death Cult(who eventually became rock icons The Cult). Songs such as Sea Within A Sea evoke a Krautrock/Kraftwerk feel with it's looping, recurrent back-beat and droning lyrics, while Scarlet Fields(for my money the best track on the album) has a synth soundscape that feels like a reworked "Love Will Tear Us Apart". Mirror's Image, the opening track is a great kicker with a fantastic mixture of Iggy Pop's The Idiot and The Verve's A Storm In Heaven, and while most of the songs bear resemblance to their influences all of the music feels refreshingly original.
Thankfully this album is an absolute triumph for the band. With that being said however I must say that Farris Badwan's lyrics can tend to fall on the drab and dreary cliché side, but that is only a minor setback. While these lyrics may not be original, the entirety of the album is. The Horrors tried to paint a picture with sound and made a wonderfully grim mess of the place.
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