Gig review: The Horrors, Liquid Room

ON A LIST of successful rock career reinventions, Southend-on-Sea quintet the Horrors would surely figure near the top.

The fun but gimmicky horror-rock style of their 2007 debut album Strange House has been superseded by the radiant credibility of subsequent records Primary Colours and Skying, which recast them as among the foremost genre reinterpreters of our time. So this live set at once had the quality of a student union gig in 1986 and a rich exploration of the history of alternative music from circa 1975 to 1995.

Despite the obvious youth of singer Faris Badwan (tall, skinny, fringe like a pelmet) and keyboard player and prime musical mover Rhys Webb (grey suit jacket and shirt buttoned to the collar like a 1960s television spy), their music is littered with callbacks to music made decades ago, for example the Krautrock-style repetitive figures of Sea Within a Sea or the thick shoegaze basslines and lazy swirling guitar of Endless Blue.

It was a laid-back set which demanded rapt attention and at its finest points burst unexpectedly into life, for example the effect-drenched Echo & the Bunnymen-style anthemics of Still Life, the ghostly Factory Records funk of Mirror’s Image and finally the epic rush of Moving Further Away, a song which began with a collision of electronic rhythms reminiscent of both Kraftwerk and Orbital and ended with Badwan jabbing his microphone into an amplifier to incite a shriek of feedback. For a history lesson, it sure was exciting.

Rating: ****