The Horrors--Primary Colors: Powerpuff Ghouls Prove Post Punk a Perpetual Resource

A lot of cool people love The Horrors. Cool people can have lapses of taste too, but for the record, Henry Rollins thinks they’re great; Bad Seeds/Grinderman drummer and Vanity Set weirdo Jim Sclavunos produced “Count In Fives”, a mod-goth glove slap of a single; Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner produced their debut album, Strange House. Zinner seems to have acted as a bit of a goth Svengali to the susceptible British youths, because that album casts the impression of a really fey Cramps and Birthday Party meeting in an opium parlor where the karaoke machine has nothing to offer but Screaming Lord Sutch’s greatest hits. This time around, The Horrors are being co-produced by Geoff Barrow out of Portishead. The goth aesthetic has been returned to the tomb and now the band have decided to trick out those Joy Division/Chameleons vibes that every other indie band has been noodling around with since the start of the '00's. On their attempt, The Horrors have inserted synths and dabbed some shoegaze tones over the whole formula, and they meander into Spacemen 3 territory on occasion.

So far this is all sounding really awful and derivative, right? For some reason--maybe it’s because, on songs such as “Who Can Say,” those prominent synths have a tendency of evoking the A Clockwork Orange soundtrack---Primary Colors is not awful. Instrumentally, many of the songs are genuinely beautiful. Were the whole album devoid of vocals, it would be a creamy post punk shoegaze delight, but alas, singer Faris Badwan has got to ruin such songs as “New Ice Age” (really? Like it’s not obvious enough that you guys are Joy Division fans) by maintaining the same gutter rat vocals he employed on The Horrors’ debut. Although, Badwan’s voice being such a fright and all, I suppose The Horrors still live up to their name in spite of no longer being a goth band.

Another snag preventing me from taking full enjoyment in Primary Colors, and another argument for Badwan’s voice being disposable, is that the lyrics are fairly unspectacular. “I Can’t Control Myself,” a track in which the band gets their Spiritualized on, appears to be a sex song. As far as the allure of bands and artists go, there are two types: the charismatic sex beasts you want to take to bed after one chord progression, and the otherworldly creatures who you simply want to enjoy superficially. The Horrors epitomize the latter.

Yet the lackluster lyrics again make us grateful that The Horrors at least know how to blend the best bits of their great record collection into moving songs. “Scarlet Fields” may be the best track on the album, but it’s such a mish mash of influences--those A Clockwork Orange synths, some Pixiesesque rhythms, My Bloody Valentine noises succeeding the nervy post punk chorus--it’s a marvel that the song actually works. Now, if only Badwan could have affected the fuzzy shoe gaze murmur he displays here for the entirety of the album.

I am a little sick of bands continuously flirting with post-punk styles, no matter how endlessly pliable the genre is. The last time I listened to Primary Colors’ final track, “Sea Within A Sea,” I skipped the two minute fade out and put on Magazine; at least with them, the vocals are bad-interesting, not bad-ingratiating. Yet, if bands like The Horrors continue tampering with and reshaping the basic formula, I’ll keep my complaints to a minimum. That The Horrors have fooled me by proving they do have a bit of substance behind their style, however, is something in which I’ll remain quite vocal in my agitations.

Level of Disappointment: 5; I think the real reason Henry Rollins likes them so much is because he’s capable of bench pressing all of them at once, though.

Watch: “Who Can Say” official video (Like the video for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “In the Ghetto” without a fraction of the drugs or sex appeal).