The Horrors – Still Life
If you like [insert British 80s group here], there’s also this:
[Video][Website]
[6.50]
Katherine St Asaph: “Still Life” sounds like the product of stumbling out into 3 a.m. streetlights, app-grafting a beat onto whatever ambience you find there and pretending your scruffy, drink-doused voice has become Chris Martin’s. By 4 a.m., you’re still standing there, convinced that “when you wake up, you will find me” is romantic and, if repeated enough times with proper swoon, will prove itself right. You wake up alone.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Those synths — have these boys been listening to The Head on the Door-era Cure? The singer — is he imitating Ian McCullough without the phlegm and vibrato? No wonder he hides behind the backwards tape effect which provides the hook. Is that why they call the song “Still Life” — they’re capturing a privileged moment of post-eighties goth contemplation?
[6]
Anthony Easton: Mild discontentment is not horror.
[6]
Michaela Drapes: It’s a slow motion time machine ride; these crate-diving younguns have made it up to the Thompson Twins and Echo and The Bunnymen discographies, apparently. Not that I’m complaining; I find The Horrors’ knack for musical ventriloquism fascinating, as they always skim right over nostalgic sinkholes and bring best of the past into dazzling relief right here in the present. “Still Life” may essentially sound about thirty years old, but there’s a modern vibrancy (and perhaps it’s just modern production techniques) that explodes old familiar themes beyond the safe and cozy boundaries of memory. [Full disclosure: I once spent a few hours in a miniscule firetrap of a green room with The Horrors without actually realizing it was them — until sometime the next day.]
[8]
Rebecca Toennessen: This is really 80s, in a good way! I can’t think of who the singer reminds me of – maybe the dude from Simple Minds? When I first heard this on the radio I thought it was an old song I hadn’t heard before. Takes some time, but is certainly a grower — solid rhythm section, capable guitar & synth and that oh-so-familiar voice.
[7]
Ian Mathers: One of the reasons I liked the Horrors’ last album was its determined sonic and lyrical ugliness, viciousness even, but now seems like a perfect time for them to turn gently reassuring instead. As the band continues its surprisingly effective embrace of the dreamier, post-shoegaze end of its influences, they start seeming both more out of time and more of this time. I used to think that they were going to be our Cramps (and didn’t think much of them at the time, no disrespect to the Cramps); now it appears that they’re going to our Comsat Angels, and I’m overjoyed at the prospect.
[8]
Jer Fairall: Ocean Rain-era Echo and the Bunnymen evoked so accurately that I’m genuinely surprised, mostly because I thought that this was a well visited so often by so many post-millennial indie bands it must have run dry by now. These guys get points for their attentiveness to certain details that others failed to recognize — the slow build rather than the immediate blur, the epic synth lines — but I still can’t get over how this has basically made its point long before it ends, and how no amount of appreciation of genre tropes done right can keep my attention from drifting every time I try to get through this feeling as enthralled as I know I should be.
[6]
Jake Cleland: As Tom Ewing pointed out in his excellent Guardian column, The Horrors have smoothed out all their edges and in doing so become another boringly tedious British rock band (I’m paraphrasing slightly).. I feel like the minority in saying this, but they used to be such an excitingly wild act who, totally typically, have been ruined by the pursuit of success. The contrast between “Count in Fives” from their first album and this is like bumping into a kid you hung out with in high school five years later. Doing coke with all your friends in that squat was unreal but now he’s a supermarket store manager and it makes you wonder whether he’s become more boring or if you’ve just refused to grow up. Either way you still long for those days. Everyone changes, and how unfortunate.
[1]
Brad Shoup: Thank your friendly local A&R rep, kids. In just a few years the Horrors have gone from Stooges to Idiots. Every step on their journey – and admittedly, I keep checking out only to snap back — has been marked by its own kind of decadence: from smirking garage punk to motorik/Suicide nods to the single at hand (Each step has been visually documented in suitable, myth-making fashion). “Still Life” is just stunning, a stately cod-Morrison march – and this is coming from someone whose ten favorite Doors songs are “Touch Me” and “Hyacinth House”. Melodically, the chorus is a blood relative of the latter, but where Jimbo was croaking on the floor, Faris leers from about two feet overhead. It’s a slow groove, and some will certainly find the arrangement elementary, but unease this powerfully engineered is its own kind of decadence.
[10]
Kat Stevens: It’s awful when you hear a band’s name and superimpose the qualities and recollections of a similarly-named but 100% more loathsome band onto their music, which you have yet to hear. I heard this song on the radio and couldn’t believe that the dreadful bunch of coke-addled tossers my band shared a bill with 7 years ago could come up with something good enough to be played on said radio. Thankfully my memory is bad and The Horrors are far better than their name suggests.
[7]