Review: An End Has A Start

Editors (pictured) burst onto the scene in the last few years as the band that sounded most like Joy Division, other than Interpol. Their highly-anticipated second album was recently released. Eyewear had been very hopeful it would be even better than their haunting, morbid first album.

The current English guitar band style is, broadly-speaking, to be angular and anguished - and always anthemic - this period style starting with Radiohead, moving to Coldplay, and then erupting in a variety of bands like Franz Ferdinand, Snow Patrol, and now Editors. This English Line of moody, introspective, yet ringing bands is perhaps inspired by U2 (though often borrowing heavily from great unsung Simple Minds).

The new album under discussion here, is ten songs that each lay claim to being stirring and existential. Most are about air disasters, imminent death of loved ones and one's self, and the general morbidity of late capitalist society. The songs are propelled by dramatic drums and churning guitars, and the vocals ache with solemn - if somewhat neurotic - suffering ("I need you to tell me it's okay"). Teenagers everywhere will enjoy these songs while reading Ecce Homo. I admire the seriousness, even the portentousness, of this work. It is just right for the Brown Age of wicked NHS criminals intent on blowing young female dancers in night-clubs to decadent bits. It has the grandeur and tedium of the age down pat, if not its inconsequential inanity.

Is it a great album? No. But it seeks to plant the seed of a heart in very dark ground. Perhaps even consecrated ground. It may be a grower. "Bones", the fourth track, is already sounding better, as is the fifth, "When Anger Shows". Something sad-tender is rubbing against the world's contemporaneous terrors to start a fire, make a noise.

Eyewear gives it four specs.

Comments

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Search This Blog