Well, this is a surprise. When The Horrors sprang from nowhere three years ago with their schlocky nicknames, preposterous bowl cuts and Beetlejuice-meets-The Strokes attire, they were a magazine editor’s wet dream. Sure enough, the editors duly obliged by putting them on the cover of a thousand magazines, this one included. In fact, NME editor Conor McNicholas – an early champion of the band – even admitted, “They look awful and sound terrible, but so did the Sex Pistols.” Needless to say, with debut album Strange House barely troubling the Top 40, they have not had the impact of Rotten and friends, however much hype they managed to generate early on. And so you might imagine that three years on from their emergence, they are set to be a ludicrously dressed footnote in history. A Flock Of Seagulls for the Noughties, if you will, only without any hits.
And here’s where things get interesting. Far from continuing to plough the same goth-punk furrow that made them, the Southend quintet have returned with an album that sounds like an entirely different band, even down to portentous vocals of Faris Badwan. Recorded with Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and film director Chris Cunningham, Primary Colours is a serious record indeed, an astoundingly successful foray into post-punk, shoegaze and a smidgen of Krautrock, with several of the best tracks heard so far this year. The knee-jerk reaction on discovering this would be to accuse them of being musical dilettantes, ready to attach themselves to whatever musical movements happen to be in vogue this week. There is some merit in that argument – it’s initially hard to swallow such an abrupt U-turn, especially from a band so widely vilified two years ago – but trust us, just listen to the album. It’s fantastic, and while the reference points jump out at you on every song, it’s no mere exercise in pastiche.
Badwan’s vocals throughout bear shades of Ian Curtis, Nick Cave and The Chameleons’ Mark Burgess; a rich croon entirely suited to the material. As for the songs, eight-minute first single ‘Sea Within A Sea’ is as ballsy as a comeback as you are likely to hear, with an insistent motorik beat that could quite easily go on forever. The Portishead connection is revealed in the way the song ends up channelling their ‘The Rip’, one of the songs of last year enriching this year’s model. Follow-up single ‘Who Can Say’ is another triumph, even managing a nod to The Shangri-Las (Badwan is a Sixties girl group connoisseur, apparently) in a spoken-word breakdown that could easily be horrific but somehow works. When the soaring synth and wailing guitars crash back in, it’s like a shot of pure adrenaline. The brooding ‘I Only Think Of You’, meanwhile, shares the lurching rhythm of The Fall’s ‘Winter’, but then that was itself nicked from ‘Weissensee’ by Neu!, so who’s counting? And all around, the reedy synths and cacophonous guitars owe more than a little to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, most notably on the endorphin rush of ‘Do You Remember’ and the frantic ‘Three Decades’. But if you’re going to steal, you might as well steal from the best – and pull it off with aplomb.
This isn’t a perfect record – some of the inspirations are so naked as to make them off-putting – but the point is that the band have done something useful with them by writing a set of truly superb songs, and crafting an album that can stand proud beside Loveless, Psychocandy, Unknown Pleasures and the rest. It isn’t quite as good as those monoliths of popular music, of course – they got there first, for a start. But how nice it is to be proven spectacularly wrong once in a while. Chris Jones
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DOWNLOAD: ‘SEA WITHIN A SEA’, ‘WHO CAN SAY’, ‘DO YOU REMEMBER’.
FOR FANS OF: MY BLOODY VALENTINE, THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN, NEU!.
Posted on: 27th January 2010
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