Every month at ZEST, I review an album. Sometimes it’s something new. Sometimes, like last month, it’s a forgotten favourite that comes back to life. That happened while listening to The Horrors’ latest, Night Life, great, by the way, which pulled me straight back to Primary Colours.
Released in April 2009, ‘Primary Colours’ is the second studio album by English band The Horrors, and the moment they stopped dressing like ghosts and started sounding like them. Before this record, The Horrors were all fringe, eyeliner, and sixth-form sulking, more pantomime than post-punk. More make-up than ideas. Curious, but never convincing. And then this.
Primary Colours is not a reinvention; it is a resurrection. Under Geoff Barrow’s guidance, who took Portishead’s film-noir gloom and soaked it in distortion and fog, The Horrors did not just find a sound. They found a feeling. The result is an album that drags you through the mud of a long-abandoned fairground. Mist gathering. Generators struggling. Rides rusting. Speakers howling. Ghouls dancing. The Horrors gothing.
You do not so much listen to Primary Colours as wade through it. There is music hidden in the murk: detuned synths, shivering guitars, basslines that throb like distant machinery. And every so often, there is a horn blast or a snare crack that pierces the fog like a flare.
It is out of tune. It is messy. It is magnificent.
Tracks like ‘Who Can Say’ sounds like a rejected Phil Spector B-side. ‘Scarlet Fields’ aches with hypnotic delay, a kind of Dracula disco. ‘I Only Think of You’, reluctant to start, even more reluctant to end. Undead but seductive. The whole album is the sound of My Bloody Valentine throwing a birthday party for Suicide and inviting Joy Division to spike the drinks.
Then there is the closer: ‘Sea Within a Sea’. Eight minutes of slow, aching build, shifting from dread to surrender to something close to transcendence. It is the sound of desperation dissolving, one synth wave at a time, into a sea of electric dreams. An ending that does not ask for applause, just silence.
And it remains, all these years later, one of my favourite, most unexpected and beautiful albums to come from a band everyone had already written off. (And believe me, I saw them in a tent at Reading Festival.)Primary Colours did not just give The Horrors a second act. It gave them a soul.
All at just over 45 minutes.
Listen to The Horrors – Primary Colours (XL Recordings, 2009) on Spotify>>
Thanks to Sheryl Garratt for the reminder about the importance of buying records. I only review what I purchase on vinyl and have a general rule: if I listen to something on Spotify more than three times, I buy it.
