Review: Editors – In This Light And On This Evening

November 18th, 2009 by Oswald Hobbes / Comment on this post

Even the fucking cover is boring.

When Editors’ new album In This Light And On This Evening opens with a wash of synths and not much else, it’s a pleasant surprise – their last record, An End Has A Start, was overblown and exhausting, constantly reaching for Snow Patrol heights but falling far short due to frontman Tom Smith’s over-dramatic singing and penchant for big, obvious lyrical gestures. So underplaying their delusions of grandeur gives them a nice lead. They unfortunately blow it, early and often, with lame arrangements and lamer stabs at lyrical abstraction. This is dance music you can’t dance to, overbearingly gloomy and devoid of fun.

Fun is a big, often overlooked factor in rock music; it’s actually kind of the whole point. Smith hasn’t caught on yet – he’s still acting like every syllable he utters is a Very Important Statement. This approach leads to some very awkward/funny moments, since 95% of the lyrics on Evening are pure bullshit. Do you know where he’s going when Smith offers sentiments like “If you give a dog a bone / He’ll eat for a day / But if you teach him to kill. . .”? Me either. Dude is grasping at straws for the album’s entire forty-three minute run time, which sounds brief but feels like forever since the nine tracks here average out at five minutes apiece. I don’t have ADD or anything, but when the song structures consist of a very simple beat (often sounding like a primitive Casio preset), the same keyboard line played the same way over and over again, and some amateurish guitar squiggles that sound like incidental music from Friday The 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, five minutes is a long fucking time.

Now, I don’t want to say that In This Light And On This Evening is repetitive, but you’d get more variety in a gumball machine. At least there you’ve got different colors, and they’re bright; Editors paint in only one color, and that’s the bleak gray of the Birmingham sky in winter. There’s no joy in this music, and for all the attempts to expand their sound and try on different styles, the band remains flatly derivative, without the playful spirit of true adventurers. At least their debut, The Back Room, aped a number of bands – a basic Joy Division foundation plus some early-R.E.M. jangle, powered by the surging rawk spirit of fellow British up-and-comers Bloc Party and Kaiser Chiefs. Evening, on the other hand, is a straight-up Sisters of Mercy cop. (I’ve heard New Order comparisons, but you could take drugs and have fun while listening to New Order. Not the case here.)

A few songs are flat-out weird enough to almost work: “The Big Exit” is so skeletal and morbid that it at least leaves an impression, and “Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool” actually borders on forceful. But most everything else just drones. I can’t say I’m disappointed, exactly, as Editors lost me a long time ago. But it’s a shame that, with their third “new” direction in as many albums, they still haven’t struck upon anything singular or even interesting. In This Light And On This Evening is a coherent message, which is good, but that message is “We will never have an original idea, ever.” And that’s kinda bad.