Strange House – The Horrors

Rating:
OK. The Horrors.

Hmmm… where should I begin?

I like them, that’s crystal clear. Their pictures adorn my Multiply and LiveJournal accounts. They’ve turned me into a fetish over their Jack Skellington legs. They’ve inspired some drawings that I created and will create. And you know damn well how hard it is to objectively judge a record when you’re heavily attracted to a band.

But since nothing is purely objective, let’s just start dissecting their debut album, ‘Strange House’ (that I bought legally at ak.’sa.ra, in case you’re wondering where to find it in Indonesia).

Some reviews have warned me that the record is ‘trashy’, that if only we ‘could judge them by looks only’… so I think my state of mind when I tried to listened to the album for the first time was somehow balanced between the rather cold reception of other critics/reviewers and my own predisposition – if we may call it that – toward the band.

The album is opened by ‘Jack the Ripper’ that now sounds like Bauhaus and Eighties Matchbox B-line Disaster have joined themselves in a holy union (no, that’s a frightening analogy, let’s just forget it.). ‘Jack’ sounds heavier and gloomier than the previous punk-y version, but I love how the tempo changes about halfway through the song. All in all, I like ‘Jack’ – it’s a brilliant song, no matter how The Horrors recorded it. (You got some pulled muscles trying to dance to the previous version of ‘Jack’? Well, bite your nails in vain now, because the beat is again all wrong for you to try and dance.)

Fetihism seems to be one of the main themes of the album. ‘Count in Fives’ is a magnificent theme for all people with obsessive compulsive disorder (‘No matter what the subject I will make it apply / no matter what the object I will count in fives’). I count in sevens, by the way. And what kind of people line the gloves they find ‘in rows’ in their wardrobe?

And what’s with primitive chant? Klaxons have brought it back to fashion, and The Horrors too utilize the ‘ooooh ooooh’ and ‘aaah aaah’ to kick some atmosphere into their songs. Which is a good way to get the crowd to sing along with you when you’re on stage. And give you time to fill your lungs again with air while they’re at it.

And of course ‘Sheena is a Parasite’ is included in ‘Strange House’. Oh, you’ve heard everything about ‘Sheena’: one of the most important songs of 2006, telling the history of punk music splendidly using ‘Sheena’ as a personification of the musical genre or whatever you want to describe it (I won’t go into length here about who’s Sheena blah blah blah, you can find stories about it in media like NME). So its presence is undoubtedly mandatory.

Many of the songs have been polished, in the sense that they now don’t sound as raw as the previous recorded versions, and they don’t end as quick. Which is, in part, a great relief because you don’t really want to buy a sub-quarter-half-an-hour LP (if you do, you’ll probably like The Horror, not The Horrors). But, in the other hand, I miss the crudeness clearly apparent in records like ‘Death at the Chapel’ or ‘Excellent Choice’ (both missing from ‘Strange House’ for some reason unfathomable by me). Still, the record would have sounded only too commonplace if only it were released during the rush of so-called New Rock Revolution when everybody wanted to sound like digital technology hadn’t been invented. But now people want to sound as space-age or supersonic as possible, so ‘Strange House’ has strangely become a kind of refreshment in this brave new world of rave. You just have to emerge at the correct time to make yourself memorable.

What I feared the most about ‘Strange House’ was that this was another ‘you’ve heard one, you’ve heard all’ kind of album. But I found myself listening attentively to every song, wanting to know ‘what will come next?’ Is it some twisty turn of Rhys’s keyboard, or Faris’ howling, or Tomethy’s bass play, or… (Indeed, I think Rhys’ skill is probably their most dangerous weapon of mass destruction. You just crave for more of the sound of his keys!) And when the intriguing ‘A Train Roars’ ended the album, I was left with the feeling of wanting to press ‘play’ again.

The Horrors and ‘Strange House’ have become my guilty pleasure. The album’s not perfect, it’s not a record that I will highly appreciate as ‘the best album of the time’, but it is surely one of my favourites. And watch out, The Horrors are dangerous, and they’re out on the prowl.