Austinist Album Reviews: The Horrors & Jeremy Enigk

The Horrors – The Horrors EP

Coming straight outta the swampy backwaters of, erm, London art school…hm, let’s start over. Not to be confused with the US Horrors, who play the same excessively raw neo-proto-punk but don’t get any press because they live in Iowa, these London delinquents split the difference, both visually and aurally, between Edward Gorey’s Victorian grotesques and Elvis in Jailhouse Rock. There’s no doubt that The Horrors are well-connected—how else do you get Chris Cunningham to direct the video for your debut EP?—or that they devote most of their energy toward the band’s overall design, rather than the actual music. Thankfully they’re cribbing from some decent influences—garage standards like The Cramps and The Stooges, along with more esoteric bands like the Electric Eels—and manage a killer of a single to back up the look. “Sheena Is A Parasite” kicks the door down with a wicked drum n bass beat, introduces a guitar/organ riff that has nothing to do with the bassline, and barely leaves singer “Faris Badwan” room to breathe, let alone bawl his lungs out at the titular vamp. An EP is the perfect medium to release this kind of music, as the unaffected sound (usually) doesn’t get old over 6 tracks. Whether a full-length will be necessary to anyone except Vice magazine groupies is open to debate.

Jeremy Enigk – World Waits

With his old band, Sunny Day Real Estate, singer-guitarist Jeremy Enigk helped define what emo was in the 90s, before it became hair metal for sissies. Enigk turned his thin, reedy voice into the heart and soul of the group’s sound, singing with a vague British intonation and, when he couldn’t reach his higher registers, simply screaming his head off. His first solo album since SDRE’s dissolution, World Waits manages to sound less weird than SDRE and more engrossing than either his earlier solo effort, Return Of The Frog Queen, or his sleep-inducing work with his other band, The Fire Theft. Expansive, occasionally overbearing instrumentation is the name of the game here: witness the orchestral pile-up of opener "A New Beginning," which adds so many keyboards, timpanis, choirs and church bells into the mix it’s a wonder you can even hear anything. The record works best when Enigk stays low to the ground, as on the moody, U2-esque “City Tonight”; even so, Enigk is capable of making even the overbearing sound sublime.