plorentz's Full Review: An End Has a Start by Editors (UK)
Near my house, there's a place where you can walk up a sidewalk onto a highway overpass. The first time I did, one evening in January, I was struck by how dizzyingly fast traffic on the highway seems when you're not driving in it, facing the northeast, watching the cars coming from Sun Prairie or Beaver Dam or Columbus or Fond du Lac on their way to Madison, growing more and more light-headed with each speeding semi that approached, passed beneath me, and drove away, until eventually I made my way to the other side into the calm of an undeveloped neighborhood, all streets and lights and sidewalks, but no houses yet. And from there, the long, searing wail of truck tires rolling over pavement charged the air like some sinister spectral presence.
This is what the music of the British band Editors sounds like to me. A high-pitched guitar wail, pulsing in cold, precise eight notes, which cut through the air around you like a surgical incision. A bass that grinds like a motor, and propulsive beats that are factory-like in scale, efficiency, and unstoppability. When you listen to an Editors song, you get a sensation like standing small in a big place, standing still while far bigger things - gigantic, churning coal-fueled pistons, for example - do their heavy, fast, dangerous work all around you. The sound is consumingly loud, cathartically rhythmic, as alluringly beautiful as it is hazardous. The band owe a heavy visual debt to Peter Saville, a heavy spiritual debt to Factory Records, a heavy lyrical debt to Morrissey, and a heavy musical debt to Echo & the Bunnymen and Boy-era U2.
But for their second full-length album, An End Has a Start, it appears that they've taken out a perilously hefty sub-prime loan on Coldplay's bombast, for a set of songs that swirl with tornado fury around vague (but profound-sounding) intimations of mortality. But if each of the album's ten songs, many of which sprawl into five and six-minute territory, is yoked with a funereal sense of scale and importance - witness the mountainous choral finale of the album's lead single "Smokers Outside the Hospital Door" - the burden is not especially unbecoming. True, the somber proclamations of "The Weight of the World", set to a pompous modified Phil Spector beat - every single part of your life will mean something to someone - are the very reason we humans have gag reflexes. But when the band keep their tempos turbo-powered, as on the title track, or the fabulously catastrophic "The Racing Rats", which comes with a deliciously Smithsy lyric - if a plane were to fall out of the sky, how big a hole would it leave - and when the hollow-voiced singer Russell Leetch doesn't try so hard to sound pretty (that is, when he sounds like a slightly more well-adjusted cross between Ians Curtis and McCulloch), the result is something more grand than grandiose.
Still, aside from all the dazzling sonic fireworks, there's just not enough going on here to really warrant more than a passing interest. The album is never less than listenable, but it's rarely (if ever) as exciting as songs like "Blood" and "Munich" from their first album - dangerously fast-paced songs unhindered by the ambition that makes this new record feel so leaden. There's a general sense that the band went to great effort to deliver the biggest, most awesome version of themselves as possible. Like Norma Desmond or a burned-out apartment building, An End Has a Startis big, theatrical, dynamic, and, at times, even awesome with the scent of tragedy, but it's all just a little too much of the same thing for too long to make the kind of impact suggested by the disaster imagery the band seems so fond of.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"An End Has a Start" by Editors
Kitchenware-Fader-Epic
Released 6/25/07
Produced by Jacknife Lee
45 min.
SONGS: Smokers Outside the Hospital Door - An End Has a Start - The Weight of the World - Bones - When Anger Shows - The Racing Rats - Push Your Head Towards the Air - Escape the Nest - Spiders - Well Worn Hand
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