Horrors Live Review

Second live review for John Robb's wonderful Louder Than War website. This time of The Horrors back in October...

The Horrors
The Roundhouse, Camden, London

Only those with tin ears have been ‘surprised’ by The Horrors sonic muscle. On account of their youth and subscription to textbook Goth aesthetics, they were dismissed as jokers in the pack four years ago. But for anyone with musical references beyond the first Libertines album, there was always more going on here than, say, The View or The Automatic. At their flick-knife sharp best, The Horrors chartered a similar psychotic territory to sixties garage freaks like The Monks and 13th Floor Elevators. As their still underrated debut album, Strange House, makes clear, they nailed that shiver ’n’ shake, voodoo rock’n’roll absolutely right.

Despite being endorsed by Chris Cunningham (he directed ‘Sheena is a Parasite’) and being produced by The Bad Seeds cerebral drummer Jim Sclavunos (he did ‘Courting in Fives’); The Horrors appear uncomfortable with their first album incarnation. Only ‘Sheena is a Parasite’ makes an appearance right at the end. Instead, The Horrors more or less alternate between the Mercury nominated (which always sounds like Guardian readers giving you ‘permission’ to like a band) Primary Colours and current album, Skying. Selling out The Roundhouse is another important notch on The Horrors’ old-fashioned ‘getting-big-by-album-three’ journey.

So far at least the Southend quintet haven’t overly impressed live, alternating between a sound that lacked punch and a sound that became ponderous. Clearly emboldened by the soaring beauty of Skying, tonight any tentative stage shuffling has been shown the exit door. Whereas the less successful tracks from ‘Primary Colours’ once sounded like unsigned Manchester bands grappling with The Chameleons, now their texture and Can-like attack have an enveloping quality. ‘Three Decades’ and ‘Scarlet Fields’ have a sonorous edge that was partly absent two years ago.

By playing these two albums side-by-side, there’s also a noticeable step-up in song writing skills too. The proto-rave jitters of ‘You Said’, all barmy horns and insidious sequencers, displays a knack for grafting melodies that sneak up on your subconscious. New single ‘I Can See Through You’ was pounded out relatively early and, with its luminous keyboard riff on green, filled out The Roundhouse’s spherical horizons brilliantly.

Indeed with ‘I Can See Through You’, The Horrors excursion into John Hughes-era Simple Minds/Psychedelic Furs is a masterstroke for a number of reasons. As once U2 stadium chasers, Simple Minds have been a pariah band for a couple of decades. No one would surely borrow their shimmering bombast for fear of equal derision? But The Horrors understand – like anyone else who owns New Gold Dream and Sparkle in the Rain – that Simple Minds were once heart stoppingly brilliant. That’s right, they were. It’s this mix of knowingness on something ‘uncool’ but quietly fantastic that lends Faris Badwan’s Kerr-esque ‘La-la-la-la’ its grin stretching appeal. And on ‘Still Life’ in particular, such open mindedness offers there own handsome rewards. Elsewhere album centre-piece ‘Moving Further Away’ refines an earlier debt to Krautrock and tonight its eight glorious minutes don’t feel nearly long enough.

Nevertheless there are still one or two minor shortcomings which, as ever, are cruelly exposed on stage. A reliance on My Bloody Valentine FX touches is a tad over familiar in 2011 and, on ‘Endless Blue’, features the sort of filler riffs that Blur clumsily re-cycled on padded out Modern Life Is Rubbish tracks. And while they now possess an authority live that they previously lacked, their capacity for reinvention doesn’t extend to theatrics. This is a no-frills, heads down, promote-the-album with zero quips or surprises.

Still, when it’s an album as strikingly good as Skying, playing with such a straight bat is not necessarily a bad thing.