Review: The Warehouse Project Curated by The Horrors

Date: 15th October 

Words: Will Orchard

Photos: Joseph T Denyer

If Store Street’s underground car park was designed for anything musical in the first place, it certainly wasn’t bands. This cavernous bare-brick labyrinth has little sympathy for subtle guitar strokes or sparse basslines. For bands, what’s proven most successful in the years of Warehouse Project’s tenure beneath Piccadilly Station is a careful straddling of the indie-dance tightrope; it’s why, where Maximo Park’s angular post-punk felt hollow and unfulfilling last Autumn, Delphic’s confident homecoming show later in the season was a resounding success.

Tonight’s line-up manages to push the envelope even further, with a collection of bands who have paired taut garage-rock and electronics. Where The Kills have based their abrasive sound around their Akai drum machine since day one, both Factory Floor and headliners The Horrors have used synthesizers and effects to reshape their sound from their respective post-punk and goth roots to their current industrial and psychedelic calling cards. Trying to draw any sort of line from The Horrors’ ‘Sheena Is A Parasite’ and ‘Oceans Burning’, or Factory Floor’s ‘Bipolar’ and ‘A Wooden Box’, is a pretty difficult task, such is the extent to which electronics have altered their style.

What it means is that, translated to the echoing confines of the Warehouse Project, all three bands’ club tendencies are emphasised beyond recognition; the driving sequencer that forms the foundation of The Kills’ ‘No Wow’ is almost Carl Craig-esque in its insistence, while The Horrors’ more sprawling offerings – ‘Moving Further Away’, ‘Sea Within A Sea’ transform their krautrock leanings into an epic and aggressive big-beat style when their extended build-ups finally drop.

What makes tonight’s line-up such an exciting prospect is the extent to which the acts are intellectual without pretence. In The Horrors and support Factory Floor, who take to the stage as the last act from 3.30am, you’ve two of the UK’s most intelligent bands, with the latter’s set proving a fist-clenching, ribcage-crushing hour of inimitable intensity, and a highlight of the night despite their lower billing.

Indeed, where The Horrors and The Kills are deserved headliners, and play thrilling and rightly-applauded sets, Factory Floor are arguably the most ‘Warehouse Project’ of the three, channeling the many diffuse and divergent sounds of this 2011 season – the throbbing, yet shimmering techno of Laurent Garnier and Jeff Mills, the patient beat construction of Kieran Hebden, the trance-like, skull-drilling repetition of Marcel Dettman and Ben Klock. 

Were Warehouse Project to seek a house band for their next, as-yet unconfirmed incarnation, they could do worse than Factory Floor.

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