The members of The Horrors have always been ones for keeping busy when off-duty from The Horrors, never really embracing their downtime so much as deeming it free time to be on duty doing something else. Whether it be creative output through side-projects, an inability to put down their instruments so embracing being cover bands of their favourite acts, further spreading their eclectic musical tastes and influences through DJ sets, focussing in on non-musical creative mediums, or just pottering around with electronics, pedals, and studios like some kind of audio-based mad scientist. Basically, they’re always up to something, and Tom Furse is no different from the rest of the class, having previously delved into, rather bloody good, experimental noisetronica, inspired by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, with his fellow Horror, Rhys Webb, as Spider and the Flies. However, after a few tracks dropped here and there along the way, we now arrive at Furse’s first solo release.
Child of a Shooting Star is a four track EP, that only goes to further evidence the deep well of influences The Horrors are able to draw from, and the equally wide, as their influence well deep, musical taste palette each member brings to the table. The band has come a long way from its noisy garage goth rock beginnings, and so too has its members. Through the number of standalone tracks gifted us previously, Furse has continued to expand his horizons, and this debut EP proper is all about horizons.
On listening to Child of a Shooting Star – through its first two tracks of ‘Trans-Universal Express’ and ‘The Ocean is Teacher’ – one is immediately transported to some inbetween place, partially conscious of being present on a tropical island somewhere, the sun rising, high, and setting in quick succession, transforming the colours of the horizon in the process; whilst also under the impression of being pleasantly lost, not actually in the Hacienda of the past but in the shared imagined and nostalgic hustle and bustle memory of it; yet, somehow simultaneously adrift in space, but in the most serene and at one with the universe kind of way.
It’s not all smiles and sunshine though, Furse is a Horror after all, as following on from the one-two bliss-out of ‘Trans-Universal Express’ and ‘The Ocean is Teacher’ -you arrive at ‘Let Your Body Go’ with its quiet intensity and teases of atonality. It’s as though the trip has gone too far and you’ve ended up somewhere on the darker reaches of your psyche; it’s a sensation not entirely terrifying, but not altogether pleasant either, just something you have to work through. Which you, in fact, do and come out the other side, not necessarily better for it, but different; something has been lifted, but something else has been emphasised – something has changed.
You could view it as the audio equivalent of an acid trip, but shortened down from around 12 hours to around 12 minutes. Convenient at that. However, as aesthetically impressive as this EP is (and the production and layers at work here are certainly that), or how pleasing and easy on the ears those first two tracks are (they are certainly happymakers), there is the danger of the tracks verging on incidental, coming across more as song-sized interludes than full pieces themselves. I almost get the impression that these instrumental tracks would work better at a longer runtime, allowing them to move and grow more, so as to fully lose yourself in the tracks. Instead of just as your about drift off, you’re pulled back to reality, only to be teased away by another bitesize universe.
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