The Horrors - Primary Colours

(Muso's Guide, May 6, 2009)

Album review

If The Horrors are to be taken seriously, there must be a new world order.

A hair band of skinny goths, they were drowning in eyeliner and hair dye when they showed up on the doorstep in 2007, but like stray kittens, they played upon the affections of the music world and they were allowed in.

Our reward? Strange House, a record which stretched wall-to-wall with bizarre characters, like Morgan who wanted to kill his family, or the glove festishist who made sport out of fondling handware. And don’t even mention Sheena, a grotesque slut of the imagination.

Suffice it to say, these artschool haircuts were a surprise hit, but had one-hit wonder scrawled all over them - in someone else’s blood, naturally. With all this in mind, it’s best to imagine the Primary Colours is a musical emission of a different band.

Oh, it still has The Horrors’ hallmarks - Faris Badwan’s ghoulish vocal backed with Spider Webb’s relentless keyboards. But somewhere in the Strange House these lipstick Lovecraftians lost their way - and found an altogether new path.

The clue to a new direction came early on, with scout single ‘Sea Within A Sea’. A delicious rumble of gratuitous weirdness, it nonetheless grabbed the synapses by their very roots. With album opener ‘Mirror’s Image’, the five-piece have revisited the great echo sound of the single, making a dancier effort and striking out in the direction of many 1980s bands of repute, in particular Echo and The Bunnymen and Simple Minds.

Without being glib, those references are far from insulting. More inferring that Badwan has mastered a malevolent growl the like of the masterful Ian McCulloch all the while backed with the stadium-friendly instrumentalism of a band far beyond their years. The howl Badwan lets out is underpinned by accomplished keys, and the rhythm gives it all a smooth, slightly unnerving base.

‘Three Decades’ starts out with the darker climes of an instrumental piece, with Webb’s organ sweeping through the landscape like an inclement breeze. Badwan again exhibits a much less stylised vocal than on their first record, and the result of everything is a mammoth musical soundscape peppered with oddity and intrigue.

As on their first recordings, Primary Colours sees The Horrors take the best parts of goth and marry them with a punk rock sensibility. But instead of giving birth to a most uneasy alliance as on Strange House, the delight here is the The Horrors have stretched further and gotten something greater out of themselves.

There’s a talent on show on Primary Colours which needs to be taken very seriously indeed.