The Horrors – Luminous

When Brian Eno said My Bloody Valentine made “the vaguest music ever to be a hit,” he noted a group rejecting the mainstream/underground dichotomy to nail a fresh, nebulous and true angle on the human experience. That ambiguity lives on in Southend’s Horrors, five eccentrics mangling their beloved early-electronic influences to make pop that’s vaguely magnificent and magnificently vague.

Easily the most exciting recent band that could conceivably headline major festivals this decade, they consolidate the Psychedelic Furs-via-Hacienda stylings of 2011’s Skying for their fourth LP, which is gratifying enough to seduce fedora youths in a field without wholly sacrificing the experimental spirit.

Songs like Sleepwalk and First Day of Spring sound like young hearts overflowing, resplendent and blue-sky vast, and though Faris Badwan sometimes annunciates with rigid formality, there’s a newly resigned, infatuated slur on highlights I See You and Change Your Mind that’s reassuringly human.