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Its good to see a band achieve success without having to resort to belligerence or aggressive marketing hype. Editors have arrived on the scene off the back of 3 rock solid singles, which has seen them steadily build up a grassroots following.
All three are included here : the imperious debut "Bullets", the searing "Munich" and, proving the first two were no flukes, the industrious "Blood".
Unsurprisingly the rest of the album continues in the same vein, with concise focused songwriting complimented by adroit musicanship. "Lights" is a burst of frenzied energy, "Fall" is like a series of ever changing tones of grey and "All Sparks" has the resigned lyric "all sparks will burn out in the end" cloaked in cavernous drums and shards of splintered guitar. "Camera" concerns itself with self preservation through emotional detachment at the end of a dislocated relationship, "Fingers In The Factories" is spat out with real venom and "Distance" is like Lambchop put through a drum machine.
The stark monochrome architectural imagery of the sleeve has echoes of Peter Saville's early work for the Factory record label, a similar aesthetic is at work in its documenting of urban landscapes as a reflection of the inner landscapes of the mind. The cover is a number of bricked arches leading into a series of rooms, eventually ending in an ominously dark final space or abyss : the back room. On closer inspection it bears a resemblance to an eye and on one level gives the impression of a certain austere regimented mind-set made real and on further inspection it reveals similarities with the death camps at Auschwitz.
This imagery is forcefully reflected in the song titles : "Munich", "Bullets", "Blood", "Fall" and "Distance".
Some people have accused Editors of being Goth, but they're more like a continuation of a very peculiar British sense of existential melancholy and despair and the need to find worth in it, even beauty. In that sense they have more in common with J.G. Ballard's distopian urban fictions and Ian Curtis's slanted outlook than anything to do with the high camp of Goth.