The Horrors

The last thing the new Horrors album needs is a destination. Petrol-fed and in full-flight Primary Colours is an illicit thrill, the staccato goth shocks of auld flattened into ecstatic motorik jams like ‘Three Decades’ and new single ‘Sea Within A Sea’. The album revels in duels between finesse and zeal, credibility and adventure, insolents taking kraut, noise, shoegaze and dark-eyed Eighties pop for a joyride while the snobs and spods peer on, resolving to pen strongly-worded letters to the relevant authority. Primary Colours is a welcome threat to hipster complacency – it is blessed with a rare momentum and feels ready to head anywhere.

Tonight, then, and with a rank inevitably ‘anywhere’ becomes east London, Bethnal Green’s Rich Mix setting the five before us like a lax formation of strange, caged birds. They don’t look as ridiculous as they used to. The parent-baiting schlock has been shed like down, figures trimmed into something leaner that favours saboteur nuance over the lacquer of adolescent outrage. Eyes adjusting to the dim, it’s interesting to watch for crowd reaction as the puritan noise of album opener ‘Mirror’s Image’ drifts into earshot. Seven in ten are industry and the industry doesn’t dance. Primed, they look on intently while the remainder – young acolytes devoted enough to snap up tickets before they were gobbled by the guestlist – seem less prepared for what’s happened to The Horrors. ‘Three Decades’ and ‘Who Can Say’ rattle past, their rushes of backward guitar noisier than on record but no less controlled, before lead singer Faris introduces ‘She Is The New Thing’ with a sardonic “Just like the old days…”. Then he leaps boots-first into the crowd, printing their soles on a pair of sore shoulders before the fray closes in. When we leave later on, a few on the stairs mumble about preferring those old days but by the time May comes around and The Horrors next play live in the kingdom everyone will have heard the album and sweaty delirium will follow the quintet from social club to basement.

A totemic presence, Faris Badwan’s a useful barometer of his band’s growing pains. He’s no longer an invader obliged to bark for the psych-punk charge. He looks like he’s still trying to figure out how best to exist within/upon the extended instrumental planes provided by his band mates, quiet for a while before bursting back into life when his throat is required.

Many will or have already dismissed them as dilettantes. I find it hard to care about accusations of trend hopping – personally I’d rather they were arrivistes and that this music was written in the first giddy throes of infatuation rather than after years of meticulous study, ‘cause that's just as cynical as clambering aboard the bandwagon and, more importantly, it would invariably be shit. It’d be done. It’d be boring. The most exciting thing about The Horrors, here tonight and on Primary Colours, is the sense of motion and play – aesthetically they’re still as stern as ever, but there’s a devil-eyed mischief actively at work and lurking barely beneath the stony-faced exteriors. The darkness is still there but they've poured red wine over it. Badwan departs well before the last strains of Clockwork Orange synth peel away from set closer ‘Sea Within A Sea’, daring the band to find their own, new road out of town, denying destination.

Photos by David Emery