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Rating: Shoegaze mode activated..
Some exalted it last night by maintaining its purest and old-school properties in the style of Jesus & Mary Chain, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, filling it with expanded thrills and sweetened shrieks; others dirtied it with the roughest punk, shook it up, laced it with electro-dark streaks here and there, and delivered it back in shreds of filthy noise. Some made it changing, soft, and radiant (the very talented and likeable Gliss from Los Angeles); some exaggerated the sounds, distorted the tones, pounding eternally in the ears of us captivated listeners: the Horrors from England.
Dark, skeletal, funereal, led by the jerky, agitated dance of Faris Badwan, their leader and frontman, the Horrors saturated the air distorting even the impossible. The result: a mass of epileptic, cavernous, graceless, hateful but very compelling noise. All strictly in total black, with that famous gaze perpetually wrapped in voluminous hair and fixed on their shoes, they open with the first two tracks from the new album 'Primary Colours': 'Mirror's Image' and 'Three Decades', an album that definitely brings out the darker and more existential side of the five horrors but doesn't lose roughness for even a minute in the live performance. It's immediately a plunge into an abyss of gothic and funereal sounds ('I Can't Control Myself'); a collapse into an ossuary that reeks of horror-punk vibrations ('Primary Colours', 'Sheena Is A Parasite') and garage ('Gloves').
Tonight there's space only for riffs saturated with raw and dirty feedback like theirs. The voice is dark, slow, decadent sometimes it almost sounds like Joy Division (Scarlet Fields), sometimes the Sex Pistols in the choruses. In 'I Only Think Of You' it almost paces a funeral march as it is so worn out; it falls baritone and monotonous in 'Sea Within A Sea', regains its brazen roughness in 'Who Can Say' and 'Sheena As A Parasite', becoming increasingly lethal as the pogo envelops everyone around. The result combined with the nagging calls of an ever-present drum with obsessive rhythms and psychobilly keyboards creates the desired horrific sum: Fuzztones + Cramps + Misfits + Sex Pistols = the Horrors.
Now: there are those who praise them, those who despise them regardless, those who were at the Circolo just because a girl in hormonal surges dragged them there, those who didn't even know who they were, those who sang every song. I don't know if it's because I've lost objectivity, if it was the backstage's fault or the traminer, but 'the horror' infected me too and once on my way home, in fixed shoegaze mode activated (thanks, Gliss!), in perfect post-live sonic hallucination, only noise in my ears and the nightmare of five shady, skinny figures in my eyes that I felt mumbling a dance that tasted so much like the epileptic flavor of Ghost Rider by Suicide.
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