Horrors

Almost fifteen years on, it's possible to look back at the whole affair with a certain distance and clarity: between roughly 2009 and 2014, a genuine British indie scene took shape that, while sharing some lineage with what came before, was substantially different from it, in some respects even in stark contrast — yet almost nobody noticed, except in terms of discovering individual bands, let alone in identifying the broader trend.

The starting point of this trajectory can be traced to bands like Glasvegas and, above all, White Lies with "To Lose My Life", released in January 2009, followed by several other records that same year, including "In This Light And On This Evening" by Editors. Critics lumped these works into the generic catch-all of post-punk revival that swept through much of the British indie scene of the new millennium. This reading, however, carries a considerable degree of distortion away from the actual facts, for at least two reasons:

• the first has to do with sound. While it's undeniably true that these bands share white, post-punk roots traceable back to the early Eighties, a lineage they have in common with Franz Ferdinand, early Arctic Monkeys (but also early Editors), Razorlight, Bloc Party, Kasabian and so on, what's just as clear is the break in approach starting from those very same influences. Where the bands that emerged between 2004 and 2006 adopted a lean sound built on sharp, aggressive guitars, the garage element disappeared entirely in White Lies and Editors, who instead flaunted a sound grandiloquent sound, awash in reverb on both vocals and guitars, with a sonic spectrum filled out with plenty of keyboard and guitar arrangements;
• the second point is a direct consequence of the first. This new approach, maximalist in arrangement and production yet romantic and intimate in mood, brought together a whole array of bands that, viewed through the rigid lens of the historicist critic, would be assigned to different genres. So, for instance, shoegaze met a muscular, glittering form in bands like Chapel Club e TOY, the wall of sound Spector-esque returned in arty-shoegazing in Glasvegas or in Vaccines, acts like The Heartbreaks, Egyptian Hip Hop, O.Children have breathed new life into, respectively, jangle pop, synth-pop/new romantic e gothic rock following this renewed "big music" vein. Even ethereal indie-pop, a step away from twee in Swim Deep featured expansive arrangements, pulsing basslines and a rich accumulation of sonic textures.

There could also be a third point: with sporadic exceptions, almost none of the bands mentioned achieved results comparable to the biggest names of the previous era.

In any case, this new British spleen had one band that, more than any other, can be said to have embodied it: London's Horrors, who across their records reworked post-punk, shoegaze, gothic rock, kraut, baggy, psychedelia, space rock and alternative dance into an ambitious formula, often reaching for a kind of ecstatic magnificence. A curious fate, given their beginnings: in 2007 the quintet fronted by singer Faris Badwan debuted with "Strange House", arguably the most flagrantly garage revival album of the entire garage revival movement. The aesthetic with which the band made their mark and became an underground sensation was shocking and over-the-top, both in their look — lavish and vampiric — and in the brutal blend of garage punk and gothic rock that made up their sound.

The "Strange House" era has essentially been disowned by the band itself, if not in words then certainly in practice, given that the songs from that record have been played live less and less often over the years, and many fans too regard "those" Horrors as fundamentally a different band from what followed. While it's impossible to entirely refute this last claim, it's worth noting at least two defining traits already present in the band's first incarnation: an encyclopedic knowledge of pop-rock, channelled into a sound that scientifically revives and gives wholly new life to the most disparate influences — think, in this specific case, of Cramps¹ — and a maniacal, obsessive attention to sound engineering.

Buoyed by their solid success, Badwan and his bandmates decided to raise their ambitions even further; under the guidance of Portishead sound architect Geoff Barrow, on 4 May 2009 they released "Primary Colours", the pivotal album of their career and of the entire non-movement discussed in the introduction. What only two years earlier had been a horror-punk outfit as meticulous as it was one-dimensional became a sophisticated, multifaceted art-rock group, capable of handling the complexity of contradiction and arriving at wholly new syntheses.

Indeed, from opening track "Mirror's Image" onward, the intention is clear: to swallow up sheets of shoegaze guitar within martial post-punk rhythmic patterns and lugubrious gothic rock atmospheres. It's a high-risk operation, given how historically at odds their respective aesthetics are: dreamy and blurred in the case of shoegaze, macabre and cutting in the case of gothic-tinged post-punk. Yet they meet in an unthinkable union within the guitars of Joshua Hayward, a genuine mad scientist of pedalboards he assembles himself, and in the deep, baritone voice of Faris Badwan. The former ranges effortlessly from reversed textures of arpeggiated electric guitar to saturated glide-guitar chords, a style made famous between the 80s and 90s by Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, while the latter decisively shifts from the screamed vocals of the debut album to a declamatory delivery, skillfully exploiting vocal cracks to heighten the dramatic effect.

The contribution of the other three musicians is anything but secondary, and is in fact essential to the overall musical success: the rhythm section, made up of drummer Joseph Spurgeon and bassist Rhys Webb, is metronomic, with the former hammering out relentless patterns across kick, snare and hi-hat, and the latter delivering implacable eighth-note bass tonics, while Tom Furse's keyboards² first paint a long, peaceful, almost new-age ambient introduction, before repeatedly poking through with an obsessive synth theme.

"Three Decades" pushes the glide guitar even further and betrays the singer's clear devotion to Peter Murphy, while "Who Can Say", the album's second single, is a nightmarish lullaby: the vocal line and keyboard theme are catchy and in a major key, but the former is filtered through heavy distortion and the latter uses a synth sound with slightly off-key harmonies, to deeply sinister effect. Bass and guitar violate any possible delicacy with distortion and feedback. The chord progression and melody nonetheless betray a clear vocal/girl-group inspiration, made explicit by the direct quotation in the lyrics of "She Cried" by Jay and the Americans, also known for a cover by the Shangri-Las (retitled for the occasion "He Cried"):

And when I told her I didn’t love her anymore, she cried

And when I told her her kisses were not like before, she cried

And when I told her another girl had caught me eyes, she cried

And then I kissed her with a kiss that could only mean goodbye

For the curious, it's rather hilarious to compare the old song with its postmodern, possessed counterpart.

"New Ice Age" has a long intro in which the electric guitar stubbornly plays a riff built on a tritone interval (the interval that, when played simultaneously, forms the so-called "devil's chord"), while the other instruments build toward a frenzied, malevolent crescendo. "Scarlet Fields" is the proving ground for the rhythm section, which drives the song dynamically, leaving open space for abstract brushstrokes of guitar and synth, while the vocal line is paradigmatic of Badwan's new, more melodic approach.

"I Only Think Of You" is a toxic litany in the style of Velvet Underground, and it's no coincidence that Spurgeon plays an extremely simple, tribal rhythmic pattern here, almost recalling Moe Tucker's style. "I Can't Control Myself" is the residual link to the psychobilly/garage sound that first brought them to attention, played favoring sonic sophistication over aggression, while the title track flaunts neo-psychedelic organs and noise guitars over an almost Motown drum beat.

The album closes with "Sea Within a Sea", which, despite its eight-minute length, was the first single released to introduce the album. An undeniably extreme choice, as is typical for the British band, but essentially inevitable, since this kind of mini-suite is probably the most representative track of their entire discography. The opening makes things clear right away: Spurgeon's motorik beat and Rhys Webb's eighth-note tonics are so precise and relentless that they become a sort of constant presence for nearly the whole track. In the opening minute or so, the atmosphere is about as close as you can get to a smoothed-out version of Hawkwind's epic space odysseys; the mood is made even more suspended by the electric guitar's three-note phrase sent into a loop. Badwan then makes his entrance, declaiming lyrics with a messianic tone:

Marching towards the sea

Their dreams remain in the shadows

Their dreams remain firmly rooted in the shallows

See the sky scraping

See my destination, see my destination here tonight

The voice carries a melody in a major key, while harmonically the entire verse revolves around F-sharp and G chords with a diminished fifth, an essential harmonic sequence that nonetheless conveys a strong sense of irresolution and suspension. Once the sung section ends, a brief burst of cosmic, dissonant sounds opens up, played both by keyboard pads and by the electric guitar, loaded with so many effects of various kinds³ that it becomes almost unrecognizable. After a brief pause given over to kick drum and bass, with the two musicians having by now turned into human metronomes, an unexpected Chicago-house-style sequencer pokes through, a close relative of the one that opens the mythical "Your Love" by Frankie Knuckles (which, not coincidentally, the Horrors would cover in 2014). The vocal melody then returns, still in the same scale, but the surrounding atmosphere has changed: the band now plays an F-sharp major chord progression, free of tension or diminished chords, conveying a solemn feeling. The long ending repeats in a loop, with the rhythm section gradually fading out, leaving space for a coda given over entirely to Tom Furse and his taste for tonal exploration.

"Primary Colours" was received quite favorably at the time of its release, but more so at home than abroad: NME made it its album of the year, trying to fan the flames for one of the most promising bands in Britain at the time; American critics, however, remained lukewarm, and major outlets like Pitchfork gave it little attention, perhaps out of disinterest, perhaps due to an editorial line at the time generally hostile to British independent music.

The band from Southend-on-Sea then found growing success with the follow-up, "Skying", which reached number 5 on the UK chart and went silver, propelled by the single "Still Life", but just when everything seemed set for the decisive leap, "Luminous", the celestial counterpart to "Primary Colours", turned out to be a substantial misfire. Following results likely below their ambitions and expectations, the Horrors then tried their hand with Paul Epworth, with whom they produced "V" in 2017, an album with certain points of interest but fundamentally undecided about which direction to take. The very recent EP "Lout" sees them return somewhat clumsily to their horror-tinged origins, this time with an unlikely industrial-metal turn, but what remains is, by now, the sense of a band that has missed its chance to establish itself once and for all, at least in the short term.

Having established the lack of support from the ever-shrinking relevant fringes of international criticism, too often lost in petty battles of ideological positioning, one has to wonder what was missing for the alternative audience to triumphantly applaud such a sophisticated, uncompromising formula. It's hard to arrive at a single answer; perhaps the complexity of Horrors, and the historical knowledge required to fully understand them, are too demanding for audiences increasingly less attuned to musical sensitivity, or perhaps the times have simply shifted general attitudes beyond appeal. What remains is a handful of layered records, erudite yet melodic and artistically pop, of which "Primary Colours" is the summa and cornerstone, both for the band's career and for an entire season of the national independent music scene.

¹ The tribute to the garage/horror world becomes explicit with "Jack The Ripper", taken from the 1961 song of the same name by Clarence Stacy, but brought to success two years later by the cover version by Screaming Lord Sutch, an obscure rock'n'roll artist who offered an early, rudimentary form of gothic rock, at least in the macabre tone of his songs.

² A one-of-a-kind occurrence in rock history: Rhys Webb and Tom Furse actually debuted as keyboardist and bassist respectively during the "Strange House" era, before swapping roles and going on to form the band's definitive line-up.

³ In particular, one can notice octaver pedals set to the high octaves to produce a sound similar to that of a violin, along with attack delays and heavy reverb.

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11/12/2022