Mention of Southend-on-Sea calls to mind tawdry seafront attractions and Dr Feelgood, and certainly wouldn't prime you to expect The Horrors. Prepare to be flabbergasted, however, because with their third album, this quietly purposeful quintet have taken a giant leap forward into their own phantasmagorical hyperspace.
Their last effort, 2009's Primary Colours, dropped enough hints about the band's burgeoning abilities to nab a Mercury Prize nomination, but think of that one as Andy Murray to this year's Djokovic. To create Skying, they dispensed with outside production help (Portishead's Geoff Barrow was in the conning tower last time), holed up in their own studio in London, and burrowed deep into their collective resources. The results defy easy capsule descriptions, but after a couple of plays the scope and audacity of the project begin to emerge.
As the tracks surge over you, you'll probably find yourself reaching for words like "euphoric" and "hypnotic" (I know I did). The opener, "Changing the Rain", is both thrilling and startling, with its disturbed churning motion and wheezy Gothic organ, but it calibrates your responses for what's to come. This includes the urgently pulsing "I Can See Through You", whose aura of psychedelic derangement finds room for some rattling castanets, the Floyd-goes-baggydelic rush of "Dive in", and the broody but powerful "Still Life", in which the guitars go backwards and keyboards vamp like The Teardrop Explodes. Every track has been painstakingly knitted into a magic forest of sound stretching away to infinity, with Faris Badwan's vocals just another ingredient in the teeming tonal plankton.
If we must pick standouts, try the aptly titled "Moving Further Away", where a hint of Kraftwerk lurks behind Joshua Hayward's booming lead guitar, or the massive slow burn of the closer, "Oceans Burning", where swirling layers pile up tumultuously. Somewhere in all this are the ghosts of Spiritualized, Joy Division and Doves, but at this rate The Horrors won't be needing comparisons.
