The Horrors - York Hall, London – 17/6/11
4/5
By: Joe Daniels
Usually a venue housing boxing matches, it seems fitting that The Horrors would choose York Hall as the training ground for what upcoming album Skying can do live.
A band not unaccustomed to hype, this gig would’ve surely felt something of a déjà vu: the East London community centre, the new album no-one really knows anything about – it all seems a little Shoreditch Richmix on the eve of Primary Colours. However, as we already guessed from new single ‘Still Life’, this album marks yet another musical departure for a band in a chronic state of flux.
With each outing The Horrors seem to reinvent themselves, drawing from renewed palate of influences. On the first album we had late 60s garage-rock, on the second we had shoegaze, and now, bizarrely, they’re doing Britpop. From the tambourine-clapping set opener ‘Changing The Rain’ to finale ‘Moving Further Away’, with its Pulp-esque breakdowns and Gallagher-ite sneer, this is a set fixated on the mid-nineties, with its fuzzy guitars, brash vocals, and big, big choruses in abundance. They even play one song that sounds like it could’ve been written by Ash. Ash!
It’s not just the new songs that get an airing tonight, and the in-yerr-face gusto of Britpop adds new life to Primary Colours, with ‘Who Can Say’, ‘Sea Within A Sea’, and ‘Mirror’s Image’ seeing frontman Faris Badwan squawking to a raucous crowd. It almost makes up for the absence of any representatives from Strange House, their oft-slandered debut that hung the albatross of ‘cool’ around their necks. Despite the holes in the setlist where their early career should be, tonight they show an intention to be taken seriously all over again. Their performance is assured, their musicianship accomplished, and the theatrics reined in.
A fitting venue then to blood in a new album from a band in perpetual re-evaluation, and very possibly the site of a completely curveball Britpop revival, which – if tonight is anything to go by – may not actually be half as bad as it sounds.
Artists in this article: The Horrors
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