You think that you're the only one

Cat's Eyes, the eponymous album by The Horrors' Faris Badwan and singer Rachel Zeffira, is the latest record to dip back into the musical sounds of 60s girl-pop, following Comet Gain, Velocette, Lucky Soul, and the more mainstream acts like Duffy. The first track, Cat's Eyes, starts off with the two signifiers of early 60s pop: a single chord played on cheap piano that might have come from a whorehouse, and a few spoken words in a confident young female voice: "Let me tell you something", but then it falls away in favour of a slow build.

Early 60s girl-group pop - The Crystals, the Chiffones, the Shangri-Las was a slightly cynical, opportunistic, ironic, push-it-out-fast commercial sound. When Carole King heard her babysitter was being beaten up by her boyfriend she wrote a song about it - He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss - but no hard feelings because the same babysitter went on to have a massive hit as Little Eva with The Loco-Motion. It was that kind of time, when emotions don't really come in to music making.

But the later tracks on the album owe as much to a more sophisticated late-60s adult pop sound, an era of craftsmanship of songwriters like Burt Bacharach and vocal talent and artists like Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield, in their mode of melancholia and soft sadness. This is music of quiet resignation, already in the 60s hearkening back to past days of pre-rock-and-roll songwriting (Julie London, and before her Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and they heyday of the American songwriter for hire), a music of emotional expressiveness that finds fulfilment in classical form. The classic recording of that genre is Dionne Warwick's Walk On By, one of the few pop songs about a refusal to admit emotion.

Comet Gain tied this sound to a radical Marxism and it's music in the face of an all-encompassing system of spectacle - it's very small. The soft reverb, the feeling like it's being performed in a deep hole, only add to the sensation that it's the defeatism of someone who's already been buried and is just waiting for their own death. Fredric Jameson defined postmodern art as simultaneously superficial and x-ray-like, in other words, art that sees through things. The advantage of recalling a lost sound instead of creating your own is that your music becomes analysis from a position of certainty, rather than an open-ended synthesis of new forms.

The influences are various: it also relates to more modern takes on girl-pop like the electronica of Stereolab and particularly Ladytron, and the minimalism of James Blake; the brass and fierce restraint and repetition recalls the even more avant garde minimalism of These New Puritans, only without their hints of Levellers and Lollards and other puritan revolutionaries. Often with an obsessively repeated few notes, Cat's Eyes seems to say: this is all there is, I play it over again, and then I fall silent for a bit.

A few later tracks are much weirder though: Sooner or Later is Nick Cave-ish, with scraping sounds, odd percussion, drones, brass, stabbing strings, and slow male vocals. Faris Badwan has claimed the band are making pop music, but later tracks rather belie this. There's an aura of tension to tracks like Over You, a sense that it's being held back, that there's something wanting to escape, the restraining influence of the half-idea of 60s pop's smooth surface presenting an explosion.

Most of the songs are about comparison: "You're the best person I know" (The Best Person I Know), "I know I'm not the prettiest girl" and "she's better than me" (I'm Not Stupid), "Don't ever tell me you're the only one" (Face In The Crowd). Just as the singer's persona is trapped in competition with other people not the uniqueness of love, this is a record trapped in competition with the past. It's maybe not as claustrophobic as the lovingly pastoral retro sound of Fleet Foxes, which feels like a desperate wish that the last 40 years of popular music had never taken place - but it feels like a more desperate yearning for extinction even than that. Not an album for anyone who believes in the future; its utopias are all in the past.