The Horrors – Sea Within a Sea
We begin at zero and end at seven minutes and fifty-five seconds. This will be our journey time.
Durability not one of your strong suits? A shared complaint, undoubtedly, but you may be assured that song’s end shall be reached, if all you do is try. Come take the trek and “see the scraping sky.” To accompany you on your journey across this motley soundscape, one of pulsing land and blurred contours spitting glitter, will be a travelling package awash with sound.
This is what was found.
The original surge of our march is along the back of the murmuring bass line, dancing at the feet of the tormenting voice (a crooner, it shall eventually become), playfully predicting its next surge or fall and forever backed by a spry track of drumming so taut and exquisite it allows for an unforeseen wriggle free from the fetter of timekeeping. Wafting in the background throughout are the distant and distressed howls of guitar, black clouds lacking the temptation of linings. Guiding us through this terrain are pervading bursts of plush synth wrapping friendly arms around its cousin of synthesised dance pulsations. The dance floor cavorts beneath our very feet, so we won’t have to.
It is deliciously kaleidoscopic.
However, this sound is confusing. It’s exceptionally hypnotic and almost too aurally pleasing to deny yourself the joy of tormenting it with air thrown words like pop or catchy, yet its only true failing, if this can be classified as such, is its impracticality as a pop song – it just isn’t one, certainly not in shape – and so radio has spurned sound once again in favour of shape. The ear of the pop-savvy listener has been savagely denied a chorus.
Allow us to curse the very day.
Still, as the dissolving synth soars and dips and dives like a young bird adoring flight, taking the rarest of moments to bask in their newest sphere of confidence, the sound is finally swallowed whole by a falling sun. The minutes do come to a precipitous end. Fluttering keyboards providing the sounds of life with veins engorged and then one absolute slice and its final beat is had. The minutes, as many as there may be, are not minutes enough. This sound is a long trek so gloriously short-lived.
“So you might say the path we share is one of danger and of fear, until the end.”
This is the Horrors. This is Sea Within a Sea.
[Buy Sea Within a Sea.]
Kaleidoscopic was the right word.
This song is amazing. Will have to get the rest of their stuff. Cheers man.