Still playing with the past: The Horrors perform new album 'Skying', 17th June 2011

I'm on the Number 8, heading to Bethnal Green to see the live comeback of a band now defined by their ability to make impressive comebacks. A man standing near me is talking about the gig with his friend, explaining that he doesn't know the band too well but, “I like the whole genre of the Horrors.”

Inwardly I snort as my brain chips in with a facile comeback. “What, 'the past'?”

Haha. But I'm onto something, aren't I?

Just Skyin' around. In the past.

Tonight The Horrors are previewing their third album, Skying, at York Hall in the East End, just down the road from where the band lived while putting together the first album and making waves with their bird's nest hairdos, polka dot waistcoats and hanging-by-a-thread 20-minute live shows. Given that singer Faris has spent most of the past year working on his excellent girl-group-meets-Joe-Meek side project Cat's Eyes, a vehicle that got him a gig inside the Vatican, playing in Bethnal Green must seem like something of a step back. Although perhaps it's a tradition now, given that the preview show for Primary Colours was at Rich Mix, at the other end of Bethnal Green.

And what a horrible venue. At least at Rich Mix, charmless black box though it is, you could actually hear all the instruments. York Hall, a boxing venue turned leisure centre, is a velvet-curtained, polished-wood space in the typical East End fashion; a hall where drums go to die, or in this case to boom out aimlessly while drowning guitar lines and squashing Faris' baritone voice (which has always been a bit of a weak link when he's not squawking, and apparently he doesn't do squawking any more).

Given the drastic step-change in sound, look and atmosphere that accompanied the second album, I suppose I'd expected another reinvention. For a start they look pretty similar, if even more subdued and grungy, with shapeless black sweaters and leather macs hanging limply, while Josh's trademark huge black hair now drips over his face like '90s oil slick. They remain one of the best looking bands around, regardless – a band who you believe are a band, who you couldn't miss if you walked past them waiting for a bus at Liverpool Street or buying milk in Sainsbury's Whitechapel (I can confirm).

So that's what they look like, far away on that raised stage, but what does it sound like? If you've heard the new single 'Still Life' you may have noticed people tentatively throwing the B-word out there. I regret to inform you, they may have a point. The opening bars of the first song 'Changing the Rain' kick in, all booming and chunky. “Fuck,” I say to Sam. “It's not even baggy, it's the fucking Charlatans.”

Wait up!

Let's thrash this out. I've come too far with the Horrors just to abandon them when they have their Be Here Now moment (this was the first reference that sprang to mind when I heard the brass outro to 'Still Life'). We've established that the Horrors' genre is essentially 'The Past'; this is where all their ideas and inspirations come from. I have nothing against this in principle, even if we've been culturally conditioned to demand more! newer! faster! at all times, an attitude that's crying out for political and economic critique, obviously. (I've been meaning to write about this for some time re: the various discussions triggered by Simon Reynolds' latest book, Retromania, but that will have to wait for today.) But, as I mentioned regarding Primary Colours back in 2009, scouring the past for musical ideas is one thing if you select garage rock, let's say, and stick to it. But if you then choose something else – post-punk and kraut, or My Bloody Valentine – then it can seem arbitrary, as if you're shopping for influences. The new material makes me suspicious that this is in fact the case with the Horrors. First they gave us Nuggets of flaming garage primitivism, then it was dazzling man-machine post-punkism, and now apparently they've parked up in the '90s to see what's ripe for the pilfering on the shelves of baggy, shoegaze, grunge and (truly) early Britpop. At this rate their fourth album will sound like LCD Soundsystem and their fifth will be approximately contemporary.

To wit, one of the final new songs they play (which may be titled 'Endless Blue') even sounds like 'My Iron Lung', big and grungy but with an unmistakably wan, British edge. Of course, it may sound nothing like that on the record, but the miserable sound quality contaminates all the new stuff to appear muddy and heavyweight, with none of the pristine amphetamine sharpness of the second album – even 'Sea Within A Sea', easily one of their best and weirdest songs, sounds slightly turgid.

Elsewhere they've kept on plenty of the Kevin Shields guitar flavours but new ingredients include – yes – a bit of Simple Minds, plus a definite '80s 4AD quality in the clever combination of density and dreamy lightness. But again, who knows what subtleties might come through on the album, because you can't actually hear it in here. They play absolutely nothing from the first album, which is no surprise but makes for a pretty static experience visually, with Faris not venturing anywhere near the crowd or embarking on his usual disruptive prowling antics.

I'm still not sure what to make of it. Buoyed by the critical reception to Primary Colours, it would seem the Horrors have moved further towards sleek, smooth, big-venue alt.rock for grown-ups. But if they wanna play with the big boys, they're gonna have to deliver the tunes, and I can't hear a 'Losing My Religion' in this set.

From the archives: ATP Nightmare Before Christmas 2009

Five postcards from Butlins

#1 In the main pavilion, Warren Ellis jerks his stiltskin leg out at right angles, ducking and swooping with violin tucked under chin. Dirty Three deliver a roar of sound and feeling that seems to pull the wind out of all of us listening. Almost as if he’s embarrassed to be playing music of such force and intimacy, he fills his stage banter with apocryphal anti-explanations: “This is a song about trying to get crisps out of a vending machine… but finding you have no pound coins.”

#2 A sullen, grey afternoon. We find Josh T. Pearson (later to be crowned King of Butlins by Warren Ellis) holding court on Minehead’s barren strand, his beard twitching in the salty breeze. Earlier he’d delivered his desert sermons in a gust of fire, brimstone and spittle, pleading with the angels from under his cowboy hat while spinning a sandstorm of crackled guitar.

#3 In the drizzle we spy two Horrors in capes and impractical shoes, consulting a map of the chalets. Later onstage, the monochrome ones seem to win over a typically aloof ATP audience with a set drawn solely from the kraut-gaze gloompop album of 2009, Primary Colours. Though unwilling to offer any more solid approval than a collective raised eyebrow, the crowd swells to one of the biggest of the whole weekend.

#4 Very, very late on Sunday night, Lightning Bolt are making My Bloody Valentine sound like the Shangri-Las’ kid sisters. A rumbling monstrosity fronted by some horrific, mutilated head – through the dry ice we make out a bandaged ogre, beating the terrified shit out the drums like an organ-grinder’s monkey possessed. Aural itching powder for the tired and emotional, LB stir up the only genuine thrashpit situation of the festival.

#5 And then there’s My Bloody Valentine, doing all three nights on the smaller stage because they are clearly too loud to be let out to play in the main pavilion – louder than stupid, louder than hell, Kevin Shields’ curls just a frazzled halo above his unmoving body, shrouded in smoke, the band blasting out sonic weaponry that cleaves straight through the laughable standard-issue earplugs. We give up and pull them out, and sink under the weight of pure volume.

The Horrors, 'Primary Colours'

The Horrors, Primary Colours
XL, Out May 5th 2009

So the Resurrection Men return, this time stitching their musical Frankenstein from fragments of the mid-70s onwards – Kraut, post-punk, acid – and leaving behind the psych, freakbeat and garage rock drawn on so heavily for the Horrors’ debut Strange House.

Opener ‘Mirror’s Image’ sets out the new sound immediately: Krautish start, segueing into a tight bassline before even tighter drums throw you into a swirling epic featuring the most blatant My Bloody Valentine-‘inspired’ guitars you’ve ever heard (they even pan right to left, making your brain the calm centre of the maelstrom when listening through headphones), followed with a simplistic post-punk riff and a pulsating atmosphere of foreboding just like all your favourite moody bands of the ’78-’91 period.

I’m gonna pre-empt what you’re thinking with a little aside, here.

This kind of volte-face, if you will, can make it easy to dismiss a band. If you do garage rock, you gotta stick to it, right? Billy Childish would never ‘go all artsy’. Such a dramatic evolution can come across as insincere. Garage rock revivalists are unashamedly nostalgic, with an almost reverential treatment of the ‘real stuff’, the Golden Oldies and the obscure nuggets on 45s. To hear that the Horrors have moved on from the garage rock sound seems to show an ambivalence towards the Real Stuff - even a heretic attempt to better it.

In turn, this makes their new(er) influences seem almost arbitrary, like bored teens shopping for influences on a whim, scanning the racks for another sound to rip off now they’re bored with three chord frenzies. This behaviour is totally against the rules of garage rock, because three chords are all you will ever need in life if you believe in the Real Stuff.

On the other hand, you could (and I would) argue that the Horrors are merely following a thread of British rock created from what Bill Bailey calls a “wistful melancholy” brought on by 52% of our days being overcast. Added to that is the Britrock habit of ploughing the past to put it back together in new ways, as well as the more clichéd ‘eccentricity’ that British bands love to live up to. Strange House emerged from exactly this pool of rock (rockpool?), combining various elements of British R&B and freakbeat, the proto punk of the Sonics and the trash goth aesthetic of Nick Cave (to name but a few). In this light, the leap to Primary Colours looks much smaller.

The Spider and the Flies side-project had already pointed towards the new Horrors sound with their Something Clockwork This Way Comes EP, a record which sees Tom and Rhys playing jigsaw with Cluster/Harmonia knob-twiddling, half the Mute Records roster and miscellany from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. As the pair responsible for bass and keys, it’s only logical to discover that the authentic 60s organ has been pushed out in favour of magic analogue boxes and pulsing bass guitar has come to the fore.

So, that’s the New Sound explained for you.

Visually, this produces some problems. Will the capes and cravats go in to storage? It used to be that changing your look with each album only added to your star quality, being part of an overall artistic ‘journey’ or ‘vision’ or somesuch - Bowie being the classic example. But now, to see a band like the Horrors choosing to follow a different route, aurally and sartorially, just feels silly. Our postmodern sensibilities just laugh at their ‘popstar’ pretence. Check them out on the cover of NME – they look odd. Pastier? Ah, no eyeliner. Live at Rich Mix a couple of weeks ago they were still clad head-to-toe in black, but there was no sign of polka-dotted waistcoats or crushed velvet, just simple, serious, beatnik uniform. But what else can they do? Dig themselves deeper into their unfair ‘cartoon band’ reputation? Or just throw on a leather jacket and get on with it?

Let’s get back to the record itself.

You certainly can’t fault the raw ingredients. As a band they are so reliably tasteful that ‘Joy Division’ actually means something as an influence in the way it doesn’t for, say, White Lies. Their flair for their instruments (not so much skill and talent as an intuitive curiosity and inventiveness that comes from not being virtuosos) is pretty phenomenal for young band on their second album. The guitar work is identifiably the work of a physics graduate, while the clever layering of parts is subtly Spector-influenced, notably in the middle eight of new single ‘Who Can Say’ where the Wall Of Sound is gently alluded to with a spot of tambourine and kick drum before Faris’s sleepy, ironical voice intones, “And when I told her I didn’t love her anymore/ She cried […] And then I kissed her/ With a kiss that could only mean goodbye,” a nod to the teen heartbreak melodrama pop of the Shangri-Las and the Crystals. Impeccable.

On ‘I Only Think of You’ that drum-tambourine part resurfaces, but with added layers of dronescape and an uber baritone that combine to put me in mind of the current London skyscape with its endless network of cranes elegantly arching into the haze. Have you ever noticed how many cranes there are now in London? I advise you to have a look next time you’re roundat someone's tower block flat. It’s terrifying, and this song is its soundtrack.

The album’s simpler, starker aesthetic is continued in Faris’s lyrics, which work largely within the rhythms now, abandoning the wild garage rock shrieks and screams. In fact, they’ve abandoned altogether that trash aesthetic that's embedded in garage rock. The Horrors were never comfortable with the rockabilly beer-swilling hoedown stuff in the first place, and it does them good to shake it off.

Finally, there’s ‘Sea Within A Sea’, the seven-minute album outro used as a taster for Primary Colours on the band’s website. Don’t misunderstand the length - there are no freewheeling freak-outs here. Sounds are programmed, locked-in. And menacing too, until halfway through where it shifts up a gear and sounds, as they said in a recent interview, like going to the top of a hill on a summer’s day, “taking a load of really good E and then running down the hill really fast…”

With Strange House, there were complaints that the Horrors on record didn’t sound ‘free’ enough, didn’t capture the energy of roughneck garage rock or the velocity of their live show. They’ve now sidestepped that problem by writing songs with less freedom. By treating the Real Stuff with the ambivalence it deserves, and dispassionately abandoning the bits that didn’t work while seizing upon new ideas and new sounds, they’ve tightened up and pared down to create an album that genuinely grows on you, revealing more with each listen - and it's catchy as fuck to boot.

I mean, what else could they do?