Album Review: The Horrors – ‘Skying’
The Horrors
‘Skying’
XL
9/10
When this Southend five piece came to prominence in 2007 they were rapidly written off by all outside of the Shoreditch set as a bit of a joke band. The cartoon goth image, the New York Dolls buffed up hair and the overly tight black jeans overshadowed a debut album (2007’s ‘Strange House’) which could be described as adequate at a push, they were soon ditched by their label and that was supposed to be the end of their fifteen minutes.
When 2009’s ‘Primary Colours’ came on the radar expectations were low even with My Bloody Valentine endorsements and the news that Geoff Barrow and Chris Cunningham had been involved in its production. Then came the astounding eight minute teaser ‘Sea within a sea’, a mixture of early 90’s indie, swirling psychedelia and a joyous synth outro, the omens were good. Wearing their influences well and truly on their sleeves, they utilised the sounds from their favourite records, processing the sounds of Phil Spector, Joe Meek, My Bloody Valentine, Can and ‘XTRMNTR’ era Primal Scream, ending up with a sound which although influenced by sounds of the past, it was a sound that was a contemporary sound of their own.
If ‘Primary Colours’ was the glorious sound of a band finding its feet, ‘Skying’ has them sealing the deal. Convinced by Barrow to go it alone, their third album is self produced in their own East End studio putting paid to previous accusations that they were heavily indebted to their producers (see also Joy Division and Martin Hannett, Primal Scream and Andy Weatherall).
More a natural progression than a reinvention, the steps taken by the band are big, bold and swift with each album. If you look at Radiohead’s career trajectory it followed a similar path. Their 1993 debut album offered very little insight into the band they’d become, apart from ‘Stop whispering, ‘Blow out’ and of course, ‘Creep’, ‘Pablo Honey’ could quite easily have gone down as yet another album by a long lost indie band who showed promise but fell at the first hurdle. Of course ‘Skying’ is not the equivalent of Radiohead’s third album ‘OK computer’, we will not be talking about ‘Skying’ in the same terms as that in ten/fifteen years time but as a record of a band galvanised by their natural ease at making music together performing with utmost confidence and with a maturity they’re too young to attain, it’s pretty damn impressive.
The opening two tracks ‘Changing the rain’ and ‘You said’ both display a new found swagger; the former particularly has elements of early 90’s shoegazers Chapterhouse, they both set the album to be a baggy one but with better clothes, higher cheekbones and way more furrow browed angst. These two tracks are bizarrely sequenced as they would work much better midway through, this means that from track three the album REALLY gets going and the work of guitarist Joshua Hayward and keyboardist Tom Cowan start to propel the album from something good to spectacular, the more sublime moments of ‘Skying’ are the moments where Cowan’s synth playing are at the forefront, the two band members merge perfectly on ‘I can see through you’, probably their most MBV moment on the album.
The opening minute of ‘Endless blue’ is them playing at being Slowdive, Cowan’s dreamy synth work and the subtle horn playing is some of the prettiest music you’ll hear this year, the track then crunches into the rockiest track on the album, straight ahead indie with Faris Badwan doing his best Bowie/Psychedelic Furs vocal hysterics, it’s perfect indie pop music. ‘Dive in’ has a deceptively funky backdrop to Badwan playing the angsty cry baby better than anyone else right now while the track which announced the arrival of the album, ‘Still life’ is preposterously anthemic, every review has referred to it sounding like Simple Minds but that’s nonsense, it’s a big big tune with Cowan’s retro 80’s synth stylings, that’s all.
The main piece of this album is the track which connects ‘Primary Colours’ to this, ‘Moving further away’ is an astonishing eight minutes of metronomic krautrock, droning guitar feedback and even dronier vocals pitched against deep propulsive basslines culminating in something which is almost techno-like in its construction. After five minutes of this it collapses into a druggy breakdown, the calm before the ending three minutes of guitar slashing and feedback, it’s a jaw dropping climax to an increasingly jaw dropping band.
Can The Horrors top this? They’re still impossibly young, only twenty three for gods sake so have plenty of time. However if it doesn’t get any better than this, at least they’ve made an album which stands head and shoulders over all other guitar acts surrounding them.
Chris Todd