Skying is The Horrors’ third album and definitely their best. It’s big, spacey and souring, scattered with intermittent piercing blasts and weaving rhythm. There are times when there’s a bit too much canvas, but when it comes to an end it sort of feels rewarding.
It opens out with Changing the Rain and an Afro-Carribean percussion that gives way to a stringed introduction that takes flight. The low vocals work well in the mix and there’s more than a few shoe gazer moments.
The follow-up, You Said, is slower still, but there’s a beautiful quality to the sound. The verses are a little on the empty side, but that only acts as a counterpoint to the Korg fuelled chorus.
I Can See Through You opens up with a bit more pace, but repetitions of the chorus chant wears thin a bit too quickly, despite the lyric’s simple insight. There’s also something disheartening about a song that end on lalalalalas.
Endless Blue goes back to beautiful vistascapes for its lengthy introduction and when the heavy guitar kicks in at 1:40 it takes on a whole new inspired direction.
Dive In is all echoing arpeggio electric with a simple drum beat. It’s got a lot of space in parts, but on an album called Skying, that’s sort of to be expected. However, Dive In ends with growing intensity that makes it what it is.
The roving keys at the start of Still Life are class, patched over a slow bass-line and pierced with eighties style baggy synth hooks. There’s vague traces of psychedelia in the background every now and again that helps to make Still Life ace.
Wild Eyed is a bit of a comedown from Still Life, but it gets a bit more interesting with the keyboard instrumental ending. This is followed by the phazer skewed percussion intro to Moving Further Away, that continues the keyboard melodies, but with the addition of piercingly deep guitar bursts. Faris Badwan’s vocals are probably strongest here, blurring between depth and skying. The long outro is brilliant.
Monica Gems mixes punk guitar and celestial tendencies, although, the backing vocals are annoying if anything. The wild organ at the end is pretty cool though.
Final track, Oceans Burning, is gothic-poetic, slow and lacking in actual music for large parts of it. However, as in earlier songs, it is the juxtaposition of sparsity to a more intense wall of sound that makes it work.
Skying is never going to be a mainstream, breakthrough album for The Horrors, and you’ve got to love them for that. What it is is a brilliant synergy of tracks with an overarching concept of sound that works incredibly well.
The Horrors, Skying album review: 4.2/5
