The Horrors/The Kills/Factory Floor
The Warehouse Project,

Manchester
15/10/2011

A chance for the provinces to witness first hand what Factory Floor can do when the hour aligns with the tone and tenor of their music; it’s 4:30am in the fuggy Mancunian morning, somewhere in the recesses of The Fly’s mind The Horrors have flounced on stage, all floppy of fringe, leather dripping off their torsos like tar in the underground heat. Before that still The Kills – that once enigmatic duo with now all aura decayed amidst high-profile marriages and collaborations – find themselves at the beckon of their metronomic drum machine which, in an arena that’s seen beats mangled and thrown back, bloodied, at the red brick walls at the hands of the world’s finest DJs and producers over the past four years, seems laughably primitive and pedestrian in contrast.

That The Kills will have found themselves forgotten before the mid-morning comedown’s even kicked in is no surprise; there’s an emptiness behind Mosshart and Hince’s posturing that goes beyond an aesthetic “cool.” The Horrors though impress, tilting down the runway full hilt with a finale of ‘Sea Within A Sea’, ‘Still Life’ and a euphoric ‘Moving Further Away’, rockers appealing to the rave crowd without even having to shift the goalposts to any great degree.

Yet even this is forgotten amidst the oppressive tumult of Factory Floor’s end-of-days industrial techno. “Techno” – something that’s only really been attributed to them since this year’s ‘R E A L L O V E’ – is the most comforting thing available to grab on to among their hour long wave-on-wave of buttressed motorik and nihilistic noise dissonance. It’s enough to soundtrack a war, one that future survivors would say through distorted features “as the bombs dropped, we danced”. Tonight, in this heightened environment anyway, that is how it feels, and it wipes everyone else off the map.

Simon Jay Catling