The Horrors - Sea Within A Sea

This week The Horrors return with a new single Sea Within A Sea. The song is currently available to download legally from the bands official website. Just click here to download. The website also features the video, which although we have provided the You Tube version below, is much better viewed full size on The Horrors own pages. A low budget performance of psychedelic flashing colour, distorted images and occasional strobing it is artily simple and effective.

Clocking in at a massive eight minutes, Sea Within A Sea smashes preconceived ideas about the band being D grade weirdo freak goth punks with little imagination. Sea Within A Sea is a sullen spacey Joy Division like mix of krautrock and sequencers that bears little resemblance to anything that their debut Strange House served up. With soft funeral vocals coming on like a mournful drugged out Ian McCullough of Echo and the Bunnymen, front man Farris Rotter turns his eyes upward, hinting at a vision of following his own path, irrespective of the dangers. “I walk alone, barefoot on wicked stone tonight, will you leap to follow, will you turn and go, will your dreams stay rooted in the shallows?” he asks before repetitive pulsating electronics take over and Farris affirms that the path he is following will hold new fears and dangers.

The Horrors need to continue to embrace those dangers. This is a band delivering something better than we ever thought possible. Massively uncommercial, slightly hallucinatory, lacking in any sort of melody or catchy hook, it is all the more satisfying for it. The song will polarize opinion, and some Horrors fans may be very disappointed. Still goth, still dark, but also very different from their previous work.

The album from which Sea Within A Sea is taken is entitled Primary Colours and is produced by Portishead man Geoff Barrow. It is due for release in May. Let’s hope it is as much a step forward from their debut as this single is.