Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 12/10/09
Label: Columbia

It's album number three for Editors and time therefore for one of rock's trickiest manouevers, The Big Rethink. Inevitably, the gloomy Brummies are touting this as their most exploratory work yet. Sadly though, it's unlikely to win over anyone who already finds their indie-goth lite difficult to swallow. Portentous titles as wearisome as GCSE war poetry like "In this Light And On This Evening" and "Eat Raw Meet = Blood Drool" are present and correct; as are lyrical howlers ranging from the impossibly grating - "It kicks like a sleep twitch" ("Papillon") - to laughable, cliché ridden claptrap like "…cemeteries where ghosts still play" and "...winter wind, blows in from the North" ("You Don't Know Love").

Their re-tooled musical agenda is unlikely to convert either. The vaunted experimentation at the album's conception evidently didn't extend to a progressive approach to songwriting or arrangement, as in the main, these just sound like their old material replayed via one finger synth lines. If anything, Editors have regressed, letting the sequenced patterns elongate the insubstantial ideas, stretching them over the minutes to stupefying effect.

Whilst nobody is expecting pioneering synthesis or sound design to rival say, Fennesez or Autechre, it's infuriating to hear decades of innovation in this field overlooked in favour of box fresh '80s preset sounds. As most musicians know, even just a couple of hours with a laptop and a handful of the latest plug-ins can yield passable results and the lack of imagination or craft here is all too evident in the faithful recreations of the most hackneyed hallmarks of electronica; the elongated "Ahhhh"'s of New Order's "Blue Monday" in "Papillon", the phased Moogs and motorik pulse of "Autobahn"-era Kraftwerk on "Bricks And Mortar" and sheet metal, bone-dry Numan-esque Linn drums on "The Big Exit".

These records were challenging and fascinating first time round by way of their unremitting futuristic intent. By sticking so rigidly to the tones and timbres of vintage electro, Editors achieve the opposite effect, a record that looks not forwards, but backwards. And for a band that seem to have spent the best part of their career to date dodging comparisons to other bands (that's Joy Division and Interpol, in case your hearing is amiss), it beggars belief that they've now turned in their most derivative work to date. In a year when the likes of The XX and The Big Pink have deftly reconciled electronics and rock, producing forward-thinking pop that is equally thrilling, singular and accessible, "In This Light And On This Evening" is a weak, ill conceived and uninspiring effort.

    by Jim Brackpool