When the Horrors pick lead singles, they don’t bury the lede. Their eight-minute krautrock half-marathon “Sea Within a Sea” boasted affiliations with Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, acclaimed video director Chris Cunningham, and former the Jesus & Mary Chain bassist Douglas Hart. It left no doubt that 2009's Primary Colours intended to erase the memory of the “psychotic sounds for freaks and weirdos” that typified their shlocky shock-goth debut Strange House; two years later, “Still Life” was an obvious tell of the John Hughes-in-IMAX, cloudgazing reveries to come on Skying.
So it goes, then, with "I See You", the first glimpse of their fourth LP Luminous: you could spend all seven-and-a-half minutes of thinking of adjectives to describe this dazzling moonshot and still not come up with anything better than “luminous.” But the title of the song is even more telling, considering its likeness to Skying’s second single, “I Can See Through You”, highlighting the biggest obstacle Luminous faces; it's at turns utterly breathtaking and vaguely familiar, but in the end it just sorta sounds like Skying.
The similarities between old and new are disappointing if you value how the Horrors have made radical transformations from album to album. But in the longview, they’ve always been driven by the same instincts and ambitions: regardless of whether they were invoking the Cramps, Can, or the Cure, this is spot-the-reference record collector rock, and Luminous is the first time they haven’t completely ditched the vinyl from their last time out. It’s an incremental move towards the edge of the '90s, where the band slips inside this Hacienda, coloring with sunlight and glowsticks rather than pretty in pink pastels.
Luminous opens with about three minutes of anticipatory electronic murmuring, bongos, and birdcall before “Chasing Shadows” turns on the klieg lights and lets the beat drop for a crowd of thousands who will completely lose their shit. The gleaming acoustic guitar strums that open “First Day of Spring” could’ve been pickpocketed from Happy Mondays during their 24-hour party stupor. This is still music meant for the biggest crowd possible, only now the Horrors sound more suited for the festival grounds rather than a hockey arena.
Still, the Horrors aren’t Madchester purists like Jagwar Ma, or Cut Copy circa Free Your Mind. There’s too much composure in this hardworking, stylized music—the jeans are still black and skinny instead of baggy. It’s Screamadelica dosed on trustworthy hallucinogens, or Pills 'n' Thrills & Bellyaches if we're talking about smooth, green gelcaps rather than hairspray-tasting E tablets. Or, think of the Stone Roses, the outlier of that scene in that they always just seemed like a rock band dabbling in club sounds, utilizing extended guitar codas and the occasional mechanistic thump in the place of actual groove.
In other words, Luminous is Skying with faster tempos, which might only qualify as dance music at ca. 2000 "Britpop nights" at American bars, the setting that the Horrors truly belong in. They’re a throwback to the post-Radiohead, studio-nerd likes of Doves or Elbow, acts that attracted Yanks looking towards the UK because those bands seemed more interested in guitar pedals and electronic trickery. It’s easy enough to say Luminous sounds like a million bucks, but that’s not really a figure of speech__—__just about every moment here gives you an opportunity to itemize the recording budget, from whatever gets the bass on “Jealous Sun” to sound like a steamroller to the battery of guitar pedals that achieve the streaking comet sound of “Mine and Yours” and the quasar swirl of “Falling Star”.
And yet you wonder just how much the actual people in the Horrors have invested themselves in all of this; they come off like a band that wants to play for a stadium full of people that still don’t know the first thing about them. As with Skying, it’s a high compliment to say Luminous is a giant bowl of assorted, premium ear candy, and it’s about as nourishing, which maybe is the point. Faris Badwan’s vocals are perfectly situated within his imperious surroundings—half drama king, half complacent plutocrat—and his lyrics can read like nonsense, sounding like grand proclamations before dissipating completely the moment he moves on to the next thought. Whether it’s the hint of a bizarre love triangle on “Change Your Mind” or seemingly stern repetitions like “So now you know/ Turn away”, nothing really seems like that big of a deal. They have have mastered their sound and vision, and hopefully they can grow to recognize their heart and soul, too.
