The Horrors / Skying

The Horrors
Skying
(XL)
* * * * *

A small part inside each of us instinctively responds to Horrors-related news in the same way. It goes something like this: “Look at them over there with their big hairdos and skinny jeans! They look like they fell out of the Shoreditch Tree and hit every branch on the way down! Heckle them!”

It’s a peculiar response, but one that can be blamed entirely on us. That’s right, us; the media. At the merest sniff of a new Horrors release the music industry has a collective ‘Farisgasm’, heralding him as some faux-Gothic messiah here to deliver us all from an impending musical apocalypse.

We appreciate that it’s a strange – ironic, even – thing to be stating in an Album of the Month review, but it serves our central point: the torrent of fawning, hyperbolic nonsense that’s gone before has clouded people’s judgement of The Horrors, making it incredibly hard to accept the fact that they’re actually very good at what they do.

Many thought that the band had hit their creative apex with their last release, ‘Primary Colours’ - but ‘Skying’ completely turns this assumption on its head. They’ve escaped the dark place that consumed that album, allowing cosmic synths, horns and light guitar arrangements to come to the fore on standout tracks like ‘Wild Eyed’, ‘Dive In’ and the excellent ‘Endless Blue’.

They’re not perfect, nor as pedestal-worthy as some people would have you believe, but they’re still a cut above many of their contemporaries – if only because they’re willing to take a few chances and shift their sound from one album to the next. It’s musical evolution and it’s hard to pinpoint another band that’s as good at it as they are. For now, we’ll simply urge you give them another go. You never know, you might like them.

Rory Carroll