HORRORS - Strange House

Strange House. Subtitle: Psychotic sounds for freaks and deviants. That's the title chosen by England's new sensation for their debut album. According to many, the stinging weeds of the Jesus And Mary Chain have sprouted again in the suffocating undergrowth of the indie underground; according to others, it's the frayed, neurasthenic howl of the Birthday Party or the Gun Club echoing again after years of impenetrable dormancy.

Much more likely, we're dealing with a band of genuinely "garage" inspiration, the kind weaned on Nuggets and whole afternoons spent picking through tiny record shops in search of a Count Five or Sonics 45. Seen from this angle, Horrors come across as an opaque, overly philological Hollywood remake of the Fuzztones (a revival of the revival, so to speak), wrapped up for good measure in a garish, if not downright demented, gothic-inspired look - clownish and decidedly unconvincing.

Setting aside these sound and understandable reservations about form, it's easy enough to recognize the quality of the songs with which Horrors furnish their Strange House, a refuge for every kind of musical oddity and malformation. It opens with a Screaming Lord Sutch track, "Jack The Ripper", which limps along on a voice all too similar to that of the never-praised-enough Peter Murphy, before howling into a chorus torn apart by guitars as shrieking as a pitch-black flock of starving crows. Worth noting is the dense web of vintage organs and synthesizers running through the song's structure, which will form the backbone of the album's entire sound.

Next comes "Count in Five" (a learned citation), and it's immediately clear that the distance between Klaxons and Horrors isn't as great as it might seem - just pay attention to the splatters of multicolored blood regurgitated by the keyboards over the swirling, intoxicating chasm of bass and drums. Further proof comes with "Drown Japan", laid over a looped synth line and drilled through by piercing guitars and sinisterly horror-struck keyboard touches that stretch the shadow of a cackling Nosferatu over the song.

With "Gloves", the psychedelic garage-rock vocation goes back to grinding out twisted riffs, as if Bauhaus were being devoured by the most torrid version of the Cramps. The following "Excellent Choice" is, for the most part, a spoken-word piece, and if it weren't for certain sixties keyboard flourishes (to the delight of some incurable collector of antiques), it wouldn't deserve much attention.

The spasms of the convulsive "Little Victories" and its disjointed writhing in a murky, bubbling garage sludge deliver the most intense thrills, while "She Is The New Thing" is a shooting star of blazing glam ejected from the Stoogesian nebula of "Raw Power".

Even more remarkable is "Sheena Is A Parassite", a two-minute gob of phlegm that stuffs a stick of dynamite and distortion bordering on muscular dystrophy into the jeans of the Ramone brothers.

"Thunderclaps" would like to resemble a witches' sabbath or a Dionysian ritual, but the chorus is nothing more than a ragged, rather unpleasant polka. "Gil Sleeping", on the other hand, is a visionary but fairly pointless and self-satisfied instrumental interlude, serving mainly to pad out the album's running time, while the closing "A Train Roars" tries to unleash the hordes of evil, but after a decent build-up riding a mighty guitar scrape, the promised sonic apocalypse never arrives, leaving a bitter taste behind.

Enjoyable and musically solid, the Horrors' debut shows off a wide-ranging taste for references and a decent compositional imagination capable of reinventing itself with every song, marked by an originality and breadth of influences that's fairly unusual in the contemporary indie-rock landscape. It will be interesting to see them live.

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10/04/2007