Editors - 'The Back Room' (Kitchenware)
4/5
By: Toby L
This was never going to be introductory, was it? You know that Editors are great doom pop...or you know they aren't. Chances are, you've got your opinion. So: I intend to review 'The Back Room', to criticise it. I'll let the music-weeklies do those silly 'band #1 shagging the corpse of band #2 whilst band #3 take photos to sell to tramps' song-descriptions, if that's OK with you chaps. Let's not treat it as a collection of songs to be pigeon-holed individually; rather, let's treat it as a complete work, with ideas maintained throughout. Join us, or shut up and go the hell home.
What can't be denied from first listen is Editors' near pitch-perfect evocation of an industrial East German cityscape circa 1985. Go watch 'Wings of Desire' if you aren't feeling that one - they evoke that era's black and white desolated hope better than Bauhaus could have, better than Nick Cave actually did, in fact. Jim Abiss' production, refined rather than scuzzy, means that the suitably impersonal (though slightly ruffled) surface of the record encapsulates those flat concrete structures invoked. Opening triptych 'Lights', 'Munich' and 'Blood' absolutely correspond to this - all blackout discos of aggressively-paced paranoia, consistent in the mood they create. That alienated urban aesthetic is best noted in 'Lights', with Kraftwerk-referencing train-clack drumming and repetitive chugs of guitar. That raises the significant question about 'The Back Room', though: the creation of a derelict, Dresden-esque atmosphere becomes too soulless over an entire album; with no conflict between the bleak urban and a human warmth, the album may soon drag, bereft of a heart and too paranoid to relate to any listener.
Each song on its own is a beautiful gothic creation: the epic, sweeping euphoria of 'Open Your Arms' is quite rightly mentioned in every review you'd care to read. It's not quite akin to, say, the coming-up rapture of TV On The Radio, but rather guitars skitter across the underside of grey clouds while Tom Smith wails plaintively, the whole thing fairly soaring. But compare the whole tone to current US indie with similar ideas: similar structures are in play, but are successfully varied through a playfulness and knowingly wry quality that demands to be replayed. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (go download some from their site) play a similar game, but avoid the constant all-night-no-sleep, ten-coffees-and-two-packs-of-fags sobriety that Editors retain throughout 'The Back Room'.
Fortunately, sobriety doesn't mean impossible pessimism and overburdened gloom. Even better, Editors realised that constant urban paranoia without hope might be just a little too intense over a full album - it's no good your fan-base topping themselves, is it? That'd be... er ...commercial suicide. Emotion and feeling do dwell in this landscape, something is allowed to move and breathe. 'Fall', immediately following that opening threesome, shows exactly how Editors allow something inside, something beneath the blank industrial architecture, something that will graffiti blank concrete walls with luminous coloured tags proclaiming love and rebellion. 'Fall' displays a willingness to play with the aesthetic they've created to cause a fairly broad palette of emotion involvement, albeit one in greyscale. The drumming has a constancy and stability at first that suggests both disbelief and continuation, as Smith's moans and Urbanowicz's guitar squalls rise and fall superficially, grief and pain seeming not being. The beat's brief cessation two-thirds through, however, startles, a strong sense of loss and melancholy overtaking that stability, shifting the soundscape and response of the listener: the return of the drums afterwards merely a necessity to underpin the rising guitar squalls, the heartbeat now ponderous and reluctant, no longer reassuring and insisting of these shades of emotion's ephemerality, but rather underpinning their very effect. It shows a maturity that belies a debut, a desire to make something affecting as well as evocative.
By the ending of 'Open Your Arms' romantic brush strokes and the burning, crumpled love letter of 'Distance', our fears are mostly allayed. The smothering assertions of urban paranoia in 'The Back Room' are not allowed to go unchallenged by passionate declarations of humanity. One could draw some metaphor with the title here, but we're not so banal; rather, I don't think an album where dreams are concealed but not prevented by bleakness deserves it: their success is in allowing an even conflict where neither is victorious but rather the presence of the former in spite of the latter is victory in itself. Admittedly, I've never felt so sober in my life - any humourlessness in the review is probably inspired by a similar lack in Editors. Still, there's hope here, real hope in people and their rebellion against constriction - it's just intense work finding it.
Artists in this article: Editors
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