The Horrors
Primary Colours
By Michael Carr
I’m a sucker for delay. Take any guitar line and run it through some delay, distortion and reverb and you’ve got me pretty well sold. So when I first chucked in Primary Colours, the latest mind bending effort from monochrome goth-shoegaze outfit The Horrors, I was smitten straight away.
Produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow as well as Craig Silvey and Come To Daddy video director Chris Cunningham, the album has a sombre yet somewhat triumphant feel to it. Singer Faris Badwan delivers haunting and fractured vocals throughout the album while the rest of the band blend themselves together seamlessly building a giant shiny piece of spaced out glory.
It’s a dramatic improvement on their debut Strange House, with the band fully embracing a broader sound heavily influenced by artists such as Jesus & Mary Chain, The Cure and others. What really sets The Horrors aside is that while they may be influenced by these artists they manage to find someway to make it their own.
The whole time I’ve been listening to this album I know it sounds like someone, but none of the names I can come up with quite fit. There’s some Joy Division here a bit Neu! There, but it’s neither one nor the other. To be honest it’s quite frustrating but the music is also quite calming so it sort of balances out.
First track Mirror’s Image opens the album by drawing the listener into a spooky, almost aquatic soundscape that is very reminiscent of Brian Eno’s early work. About a minute or so in though the song swiftly changes direction, launching into a soaring shoegaze epic with Faris highlighting his unique voice.
Second Track Three Decades has the shimmering synth sound in it that I can’t get enough of. The whole track is a softly undulating soundscape. The guitars and bass fade in and out as different effects pedals and delay are applied and god knows what’s going on with the synths.
Next track Who Can Say, the new single in memory serves, is definitely the most straightforward of the tracks on the album but in no way does this diminish it’s quality. The guitar is relentless while the synths are ethereal and difficult to keep track of while the drums are rock solid.
About halfway through singer Faris Badwan delivers a brief piece of spoken word about breaking up, and despite the overdone and adolescent nature of the content, manages to do so in a very interesting way.
Do You Remember reminds me of Spiritualised if Spaceman did Ice and Junk instead of Acid and Pills. The guitars walk this great line between the Jesus & Mary Chain and The Brian Jonestown Massacre while the drums again remain tighter than a nun’s schedule.
The whole album is great though, each song slightly changing the mood and drawing you in to an altogether different yet still relatable musical space. I read another reviewer who described the album as something along the lines of ‘musical collage’ saying the band deliver a steady parade of influences along in an ever changing spectacle. I agree to some degree but I feel this album is more like some fucked sort of musical origami.
Influences have been folded in on top of each other, twisted turned and folded again until in the end your holding something you’d never expect to have come out of what you started with. It’s still paper, just like this album is still shoegaze-postpunk-krautrock-whatever-NME’s-term-of-the-week-is, but what’s been done with that is new, interesting and exciting, all even more so when you consider The Horrors are the first hype band in about ten years to deliver a second album that is not only as good as the first but actually better.
8/10
June 30, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Love this album. Definitely one of the strongest releases so far this year, and great sophomore effort for a group that was considered a fad.
July 17, 2009 at 6:40 pm
i agree. primary colours was an excellent progression for the horrors, and your right, they do combine many different aspects of past music throughout history and somehow jam it all together to create something truely unique – which lacks a lot today.
July 18, 2009 at 1:39 am
The Horrors are a fad that happened twenty-five years ago. Unique? No fuckin way man… You need to listen to post-punk circa 1985. They sound exactly the fucking same. There is nothing original about that band whatsoever.
More power to em I guess… If you can get away with copying a style over two decades old while people think you’re doing something original, why not go for it? Anyone who makes nonsense statements like “they do combine many different aspects of past music throughout history and somehow jam it all together to create something truely unique” will simply be laughed at by anyone with a knowledge of music that existed before they entered puberty.
July 19, 2009 at 2:00 pm
If you’re going to get into the whole reinterpretation is not creation argument you may as well write off most music made anywhere past the 80s.
All modern rock is really just a reinterpretation of what’s happened before set in a modern context that reinvigorates it.
Anyway the idea of objective originality died out years ago, originality stems from context. What makes Primary Colours so good is that for those of us who have been listening to post punk and goth and shoegaze bands praying for rare re-releases or hunting through bargain bins, The Horrors have come out and made an album that not only spans the wide range of sub-genres inherent in this style of music but does so in a way that stands up to what was made in the genre’s hey-day.
Imagine if Amy Winehouse was actually half-way as good as Arethea.
Anyway what gives you the right to judge what people like and don’t like and since when can the uniqwue not be found in something from the past. What about the renaissance.
July 19, 2009 at 3:07 pm
There is a difference between reinterpretation and imitation and I don’t think it comes down to intention, but the result. I don’t know what they’re trying to do, but what they end up doing is nothing at all new. That’s fine if all you want is some more of the same from the past – hell, I’d love a new B-52s album – but I’m more interested in novelty and ingenuity than the skill required to make a passable imitation. There are many people who can imitate the masters, but there are few masters.
What gives me the right to judge? Sentience. That’s what it’s for.