Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 25/6/07
Label: Sony BMG

It's quite a title and one that signals the beginning of an endless slog. Lifelong subscribers to the more-is-more school of thought, the Poundstretcher Joy Division have decided - after fame-heralding debut "The Black Room" - to go even larger and shinier. This is an album whose aspirations to epic grandeur rival those of Homer himself, as yards upon yards of shrill, shrieking guitar reverb - the blight of modern corporate indie - do battle with a choir, and tinselly high-hat powered drums.

There was surely a piece of A4 paper pinned to the studio wall with the words "tradgedy" and "transendance" (sic) written on it in thick black capitals. Did no-one tell them the race to play Wembley Stadium first is over? The whole hysterical mess is coated in a black lacquer glaze you could ice skate on. Who's that returning to the producer's chair? The perpetually-twiddling Jacknife Lee again, who similarly cocked things up for Bloc Party this year, and oversaw Snow Patrol's depressing transformation from indie donkeys to corporate racehorses in 2003 (arguably the moment indie died).

It scarcely matters. For as no second of this self-important LP fails to remind us, the world is full of Serious Things like death and all that, and in an increasingly secular and hedonistic world thank goodness we have frontman Tom Smith to interpret - like rock's Mother Teresa - the wisdom that has apparently been imparted exclusively to him: "You touch my face / God whispers in my ear / There are tears in my eyes", he declaims in "The Weight Of the World", a number which does exactly what it says on the sleeve (i.e. make you feel you are being slowly crushed under a heavy door whilst fundamentalist doomsters in Duffer Of St George knitwear throw boulders at you).

"An End Has A Start" is dominated by Smith's deadpan baritone intoning portentous, chin-stroking announcements such as: "Say goodbye to everyone you've known / You are not going to see them again" and "All you can hope for is the love you've felt to equal the pain you've gone through". This may do it for his lady-friend, the ridiculously easy-to-impress Edith Bowman, but dense and deep are two different things, and even the sourest goths need the occasional "Friday I'm In Love" moment.

Occassionally, the songwriting does contain flashes of thoughtfulness. No one who has ever visited a seriously ill person in hospital will fail to respond to the impetus behind opening blast "Smokers At the Hospital Doors" ("the saddest thing I'd ever seen", according to Smith). But it's not enough. Only the dourest, most sheltered soul could find the Editors gospel anything but pompous and uninvolving. Others do doom and gloom so much better.

    by Anna Britten