Tales To Tell: Editors – In This Light And On This Evening

I would previously have compared the Editors’ sound to bands like Interpol and The National in that it perfectly encompassed an emotive atmosphere comprising of misery, love and insecurity and demonstrated these themes with an imperfect, overdriven, coarse and just plain dirty sound. This was such a remarkable method to me in that the emotions they centralized their themes around should be conveyed as dirty, difficult, overpowering and rough.

I think this is where this album lost me with the shift towards a significantly more pre-determined clean sound focused around the atmosphere created by a synthesizer and keys. This shift essentially seemed to suggest a planned movement from their coarse misery mongering tracks to an attempt at creating an epic stage sound seeking to repeatedly chill the audience’ collective spines and unfortunately failing to do so. But I missed the old sound created on the foundations of an overdriven guitar tearing the rhythm from charismatic and powerful percussion, and ultimately created to flawlessly embody misery and loss in their infinite malice.

The newly recognised dominant synthesizer element isn’t all bad. At times it adds a lot to the sound they’re aiming to achieve, but though I hate to say it, some moments were reminiscent of an under-funded soundtrack to a tacky 80s flick rather than spine-chilling anthems that were evidently the intention.

Now I swear I’m not trying to totally bag the album, it has value. I can listen to this record as a separate entity to the Editors’ career and reasonably enjoy it. But when compared to the older albums and expecting the same promise, the album falls significantly short.

When I finally found a track that allowed me to feel the release of the rage that accompanies insecurity, loss and misery, I was further disappointed to find that the song I was appreciating as I did their former productions, ‘This House Is Full Of Noise’ was an extra that had been cut from the album and only appeared on the special edition. My favorite song was a CUT!? Where were they trying to go with this sound that they had to cut anything resembling their old stuff?

As you can see this album disappointed me. Maybe as I have more time to merger the two significantly different sounds as my imagining of the Editors I’ll be able to better appreciate it. But for now I suggest that before you buy this album you check out a few tracks online and recognize that you may as well be buying an album by an equally talented band heading in an entirely different direction to what you know from the Editors.