Somehow, despite shilling hand-me-down post-punk in platinum-selling quantities to both Europe and the U.S., Birmingham's Editors have kept a low profile throughout indie's revivalist witch hunt. While the mere mention of the Killers, Kaiser Chiefs, or the Bravery incites your average post-punk/New Wave purists to grab their torches and pitchforks (pun intended), Editors' widespread fame and genre piggybacking is often met with a sigh and shrugged shoulders, an odd moment of tolerance and civility amidst the Lord of the Flies behavioral patterns exhibited towards their contemporaries.
So I insert An End Has a Start into my computer, ready to expose their failings to cyberspace, pausing only to giggle at the LP's cornball title, when a funny thing happens: their songs don't totally suck. Like their debut The Back Room, the band's sophomore effort gets good mileage out of worn-out ideas, hoping to fiddle with heartstrings effectively enough to distract listeners from its myriad shortcomings. Frontman Tom Smith still channels Ian Curtis' dour spirit pretty shamelessly, but on songs like "Bones" or the title track he manages the occasional hook to raise up the crumbling wall of sound erected by his bandmates.
A theatrical streak runs through An End, and it's about the only distinguishing quality between their two albums-- a pretty amazing feat considering how bloated Editors already sounded on The Back Room. If Smith could dislodge the frog in his throat, he'd be a dead ringer for Bono on life-affirming motivational numbers like "Push Your Head Towards the Air" and single "Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors", a stark contrast to their more fidgety (and less wordy) previous singles "Bullets" and "Munich".
If only the band could better foster the instrumental bite heard in "Escape the Nest"'s stratospheric guitar riff or the "I Will Follow"-inspired lick that kicks off "Bones", the heaps of sap would be easier to stomach. Instead, Smith's emoting tells but doesn't show, eschewing the impressionism of his favorite bands in favor of protracted ballads and heart-on-sleeve lyrics crammed asses-to-elbows in choruses too small to hold them. On "The Weight of the World", perhaps the album's histrionic pinnacle, Smith resorts to the sort of sweet nothings found in a prom's closing song: "There are tears in my eyes/ Love replaces fear/ Every little piece in your life/ Will add up to one/ Every little piece in your life/ Will mean something to someone."
It's a shame that premature commercial success has sullied Editors' creativity, because An End contains its share of bright spots. However, that "weight" Smith is feeling probably stems from a sudden need to bolster the band's sound proportionately with their massive fame, a move that a group like the Arcade Fire could pull off on a follow-up album, but not a Joy Division/Interpol/U2 cut-and-paste effort like Editors. In a perfect world, these guys would never escape the shadow cast over them by their predecessors, but they could at least do more than compromise them with mass-marketable bombast and arena posturing.
