Luminous
The similarities between the Horrors' last album and their latest are disappointing if you value how they've previously made radical transformations from album to album. Luminous is an incremental move towards the edge of the 1990s, where the band slips inside this Hacienda, coloring with sunlight and glowsticks rather than pretty in pink pastels.
Faris Badwan and co. break new ground on their fourth LP. Forget shoegazing - any gazing is now being done upwards.
As good as the Horrors' third album Skying was, it sometimes felt like the band expanded on the risks they took on Primary Colours in ways that felt reliable instead of daring.
When Brian Eno said My Bloody Valentine made “the vaguest music ever to be a hit,” he noted a group rejecting the mainstream/underground dichotomy to nail a fresh, nebulous and true angle on the human experience. That ambiguity lives on in Southend’s Horrors, five eccentrics mangling their beloved early-electronic influences to make pop that’s vaguely magnificent and magnificently vague.
Although their first album came out a little over seven years ago, it seemed like eons passed between the release of the Horrors' weirdo garage rock debut, 2007's Strange House, and their psychedelic ode to shoegaze, 2011's Skying.
The Horrors first exploded onto the scene in 2006, a gang of cartoon goths playing a snarling brand of psycho-garage that sounded like nothing anyone had heard for a very long time.
Album review: The Horrors - 'Luminous'. "A warm embrace from a band that used to want to boot your shins in…"
The Horrors attempt to build on 2011's Skying, but are hamstrung by the law of diminishing marginal returns, writes <strong>Kitty Empire</strong>
The Horrors continue to refine the sound they hit on for their Primary Colours album, and still sound way ahead of most of the competition, writes <strong>Tim Jonze</strong>