The Horrors – Skying (XL/Border) CD REVIEW

THE RECENT Cat’s Eyes project from The Horrors frontman Faris Badwan is, I’m sorry to report, much better than the latest project from the parent band.
It’s not that Skying is a poor record, it’s just that underneath those trippy My Bloody Valentine-inspired textures, the actual songwriting isn’t that interesting, and where Cat’s Eyes benefited from a Spector girl-group influence, The Horrors simply find themselves mired in the ordinary.
Okay, so the album is intermittently entertaining, even captivating for tantalisingly brief moments in time. Certainly, their ghostly evocations are rich enough, conjuring up something of the twisted orchestral weirdness of The Beatles ‘Day In The Life’ one moment, and the next, the spirit of Jim Morrison to a demented swirling circus organ.
But the songs themselves are rather predictable, most of the time, and even tend towards the anthemic at times, and surely there are enough anthem bands in these anthem times in which we live.
The best things about Skying are the spooky psychotropic incidents where everything threatens to fly off the handle into something genuinely off-the-wall.
The sound quality, while energised and throaty and not without depth, is also a little too edgy for comfortable listening, on my hi-fi at least. (On the radio on an average sound system, they sound just fine). GARY STEEL
Music = 3.5
Sound = 3.5