Slow Victories

On their singles and EPs, the Horrors proved they'd done their post-punk and freakbeat homework. With their debut album, Strange House, they push their sound forward, distill it to its rawest essence, and give it a few funhouse mirror twists and turns for good measure. Almost half of the songs on the album already appeared on previous Horrors releases, but the ever-so-slightly cleaner production here gives more definition to their black-on-black sound. The band kicks off Strange House by revisiting their cover of Screaming Lord Sutch's "Jack the Ripper," which begins at a zombie-slow pace, then suddenly speeds up halfway through, transforming into a hurtling roller coaster of a song that makes a great introduction to Strange House's mix of campy humor, energy, and menace. With its dive-bombing noise barely held together by Faris Badwan's shouting and the faintest hint of a melody, "Sheena Is a Parasite" is still the Horrors' best and most radical song, although several other tracks here rival its black-hearted thrills.

This is an album about insomnia. It is, however, not a proposed solution. Not a cure. It is not something to “help you sleep.” Ours is an affliction not curable by a mere 80 minutes of sounds. If only it were that simple. It is, instead, the tale of a night in that life. Each hour, each step on the path, each milestone in a night that stretches like an eternity while you wish with all your might to make it the blink of an eye it so easily is for the rest of the world. It is the story of the silent struggle… a lifetime's parade of victories and defeats distilled down to a mere matter of hours. The story of memory… the memory of sleep. The calm hypnosis always out of reach, seemingly so readily granted to the rest of the world as you toil alone. One vigil to the next. The story of a night that might as well be an eternity. Each track was recorded in one take at the time of night that bears its name, on nine separate occasions.

For the last 30 years, Greg Dulli, frontman of The Afghan Whigs and The Twilight Singers, has been the poet laureate of the bizarre whims and cruel tangents of desire. A foremost authority on the sell-your-soul rewards of carnal lust, the high voltage epiphanies of chemical enhancement, and the serotonin lows left in their wake.Therein lies Random Desire, the first solo album under Dulli’s own name, via Royal Cream / BMG.

This fabulous five disc set is replete with some of those old Stokowski warhorses all recorded in absolutely mind boggling Phase 4 sound, overblown perhaps but astounding for its time. Decca's remastering is absolutely magnificent and the discs are jam packed with almost six hours of music. This is another fine memorial to a great conductor who remained astonishingly vital until the very end of his life.