CD: Editors - The Weight of Your Love

Being assigned to review Editors on the Other Stage at Glastonbury 2007, when Shirley Bassey was on the main Pyramid, was not a good way to consolidate my already fragile critical relationship with the Brummie quartet. Their music pushed my mind to predictable comparisons, ones many had drawn before – Joy Division, notably.

Thus I avoided them from thereon, left them alone and they left me alone, going on to sell millions of albums of gloom-flecked indie, tinted with a – to my ears, rather unsatisfying - smidgeon of electronics.

Now their fourth album arrives bearing possible good news (at least, from my perspective). The band has parted ways with guitarist Chris Urbanowicz, a founding member and chief architect of their sound. He has been replaced by a pair of new recruits, Justin Lockey of defunct alt-rockers yourcodenameis:milo and Elliott Williams of equally defunct Manchester melancholics Airship. Claims are being made of a new sound and a drift towards Americana. This seems promising, and the album starts well. Opener “The Weight” is a moody string-swathed rocker with enjoyably doomed lyrics such as “I’m a lump of meat with a heartbeat”, followed by the lighters-in-the-air “Sugar”. Soon, however, the stadium rock-ness of it all palls, whiffs of U2 and Snow Patrol crop up, and the giant central opus “Nothing” with its Clint Mansell-designed orchestral flourishes, while impeccably constructed, fails to ignite.

They weren’t lying: it is a step away from Editors’ previous fare. Singer Tom Smith attacks a falsetto on the piano-led “What Is This Thing Called Love”, there’s a hint of country twang to “The Phone Book” and a rhythmic jauntiness to “Formaldehyde”, but it’s not enough, either in quantity or in terms of breaking new ground. Instead The Weight of Your Love, an album all about love in its many forms, falls into the middle ground of a carefully maintained long term relationship where the thrills have dissipated.

Watch the video for "The Weight"