Album Of The Week: The Horrors Luminous

Album Of The Week was a straight-up dogfight this week, a brutally even match between two strong competitors. In one corner, there was Lykke Li's beautifully heart-trampled breakup album I Never Learn, in which Li ditches all her kinda-cute dance-pop tics and goes straight for the emotional jugular. For a breakup album, this one takes the rare oh wow, I fucked everything up perspective (rather than the more popular you ruined my life, I hate yoooouuu side), and it communicates that feeling with these grandly vulnerable gestures, throwing out regret after regret and ending after just half an hour of self-flagellation. If I'd just broken up with someone, I'd probably be clinging to the album like a favorite blanket. But for such an emotional gutter-crawl, the album goes down remarkably easily; if you're not sobbing along, you might forget you're listening to it. That was the deciding factor, the reason I gave the nod this week to the Horrors' majestically swooping rave-pop move Luminous. (There are other albums this week, obviously, but these were the two I liked the best.) Luminous and I Never Learn don't have all that much in common, but they're both big and expansive, both recorded with an ear toward cinematic fidelity, both easy to imagine echoing around the back of a festival field. But the Horrors are going for tingling euphoria rather than teeth-gnashing loss, and from where I'm sitting, they're nailing it.