Shock Horror!

Faris Rotter has never been held in much regard round these parts. True, the totally-unjustified tsunami of hype that accompanied his band’s belly-flop into the world was heavily to blame. To anyone who told us that this OTT interest in the band wasn’t his fault, we simply pointed in the direction of a massive photo in the NME where Faris was pointing a big kitchen knife at everyone. Yeah, we got that he wasn’t a knife-wielding maniac. Yeah, we got that he was prodding the media’s body-jerk reactions to anything knifey, but it was so cheap it belonged in the bargain bin at Poundland. “LOOK AT ME! I’M SO CONTROVERSIAL!” The fact that The Horrors looked so pristine and cool just seemed to be an eyeliner-n’-arm-waving distraction from their empty, crustified garage boreoff of a debut. To cap all the bad-Badwan feelings in The Fly camp, one of our number tried to interview him, but he just spent the entire encounter pretending he was deaf, dumb and brain-dead. When the tape was played back it was just 1min 55seconds of Kevin The Teenager grunting. Then, just as the-world’s-shortest-interview was being wrapped up and Fazza was being ushered into a photoshoot, he made the immortal admission that “I hate this bit”.
Come again?
The immaculately dressed Faris Rotter, celeb-courting knife-toting band frontman and vanguard of the one-haircut-a-week-or-else-I-don’t-look-quite-as-cool-as-I-should-do movement, hates getting his photo taken?

Twat.

So with all these nega-vibes leaping around the office, the last thing we expected to be doing last week was rifling through the postbag, water streaming from our eyes as if we had our head out of an aeroplane window, ripping open relentless padded envelopes screaming “WHERE IS IT? IT MUST BE IN HERE SOMEWHERE…” in search of the new Horrors album.

You see, uh, it’s kind of good. Kind of really good.

Where ‘Strange House’ was substanceless, and its touchstones too cock-eyed and frameless (it’s all very well knowing what Screaming Lord Sutch’s original ‘Jack The Ripper’ and its countless garage-band cover versions sound like, but most people won’t, so if you cover it and it sounds like the Blues Brothers’ ‘Peter Gunn Theme’ gone goth, then it’ll just makes you look a bit rubbish), the follow-up ‘Primary Colours’ is basically Nick Cave & The Mybloodbyvalentines, all swirling seasick tremolo guitar whirls and doomy, throaty vocals.

So Faris, we’re gonna make a very specific apology. We don’t apologise for thinking you are a twat, nor do we apologise for disliking your rubbish first album, but, we do sort of kind of say sorry for thinking you wouldn’t be able to make an album that was any good. Cos you have done.

Now, say cheese for the camera.