Album: The Horrors

The Horrors are what you might end up with if you held a Goth Idol talent contest: they have all the credentials but little credibility, despite banging on about The Birthday Party every chance they get, and drafting in Jim Sclavunos as producer. It's just hard to take seriously a band that's so obviously trying to look like spooky Victorian guttersnipes, when one suspects they're probably as privately educated as Keane. And, while Nick Cave has always taken on big issues - God, sex, death, art, that sort of stuff - I don't recall him ever getting steamed up, as frontman Faris Rotter does here, about his glove collection. Time to rearrange that sock drawer, Rotter! Musically, Strange House is in effect a routine series of footnotes to The Stooges, with added organ fattening up the racket. "Excellent Choice" has the bonus of twangy psychobilly guitar, and the sinister instrumental "Gil Sleeping" the bigger bonus of Rotter's silence, but the best thing is probably "She Is the New Thing", a disdainful dismissal of a passing fancy, which concludes with Rotter admitting, "Through no fault of my own, I am a new thing." But not that new.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'She Is the New Thing', 'Gil Sleeping', 'Excellent Choice'