For people of a certain age (i.e mine), seeing a band such as The Horrors sum up two things; you’re getting old and your days of high placed cheekbones and skinny jeans have come to an end and been replaced with a nice early night after lines of chocolate flavoured Horlicks before lights out at 9.30.
Transport yourself back to these shores in 1992 and you find yourself in a grim and desolate place,

with grunge or bad euro trance (Doctor Alban anybody?) dominating the charts, the last remnants of a recession and a country with no sense of worth or identity, the UK was pretty much in the same state of flux it finds itself in now except the comedown from the post 1988 Summer of Love went on for less time than the sorry fall out of the Brit pop era ten years later.
It took a band of skinny hipped art students, razor sharp cheekbones and second hand shop chic to shake up the music scene and make the Country exciting again. That band, of course was Suede, the instigators for the burgeoning Brit pop scene of two years later.
Fast forward seventeen years and we are in the same place, the faces have changed but the same state remains and as for the British music scene, apart from the wanton revivalism of bands reforming for cash, it’s nothing more than a boil on the bum of America that won’t shift. This decade is probably the worst one ever for British music. Despite being nothing more than a pub band, The Libertines have influenced the majority of indie bands who have come about since their inception in the early noughties and ever since we have had to tolerate every two bit Chas and Dave sympathisers from here to bloody Albion. Bloc Party showed promise with their debut (2004s ‘Silent Alarm’) but fell down tying to copy TV on the Radio and although the Arctic Monkeys debut is without doubt the finest album from these shores this decade, what has come since has failed to impress.
It was easy to view The Horrors with cynicism. When they first came to prominence in 2007, the schlock gothic look of the Shoreditch undead, the hair (which was quite something), the celebrity girlfriends in the form of Peaches G****f and the fact their debut album wasn’t very good should have meant that their appearance on the last series of The Mighty Boosh should have been the last time they bothered us but here they are with us again and wow, what a difference two years (and friends in high places) make.
‘Primary Colours’, produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and for two numbers, film director Chris Cunningham revives the memory of early Suede with a dash of Bauhaus with the intensity of Krautrock legends Neu! all backed up with the type of swirling guitar aesthetics My Bloody Valentine would be making if they weren’t a bunch of lazy oiks.
Starting with mysterious ambient Eno-isms, opener ‘Mirror’s Image’ sets the bar high; the scything guitar work collides with Faris Badwan’s over the top vocal hysterics to awesome effect. Elsewhere, the drama of ‘Who can Say’ is the sound of 60’s girl bands who like dirty boys, the dirty fuzz bass and gentle crooning results in a moment of pure Phil Spector as Badwan recounts the time he cruelly left his girl; “When I told her I didn’t love her anymore – she cried, so I kissed her, with a kiss that could only mean…goodbye”, followed with swirls of antique organs, it’s stirring stuff. Elsewhere, Spiritualised are resurrected on the swaying rock of ‘I can’t control myself’ and the whole album is made sense by the swirling euphoria no sleep induces and cheap drugs on warm analogue voyage that is the eight minute epic ‘Sea within a sea’.
This is a band who has stumbled across what they can achieve when they put their minds to it. The Horrors have shocked all and sundry by pulling out a fantastic album out of the bag, on this form the next album will blow us all away, lucky us.

Chris Todd
9/10