Editors rock

I 'm inclined to be overly sensitive about Editors, so I've asked Editorial Assistant Garrett Morrison to comment on their latest, An End Has a Start:

The well-named Editors make Kaavya Viswanathan look innovative.

Their lead singer has clearly spent a lot of time in a dark room listening to Interpol and Echo & The Bunnymen. He has that rich, limited-range baritone that front-Bunnyman Ian McCulloch used to such great effect, but his glowering comes off as a pose.

And it doesn't help that his bandmates play like rejects from The Killers, spiky guitar lines and jumpy rhythms and all.

Editors sound like an unwieldy pastiche of bands that are currently hip in the U.K., and unless one of them starts dating Lily Allen, they're not going to make a ripple on this side.

And the lyrics? They call themselves Editors, but they trade in cliches:

When you fall and you
Can't find your way
Push your hand up to the sky
I will just run to
To be by your side

—and faux rhetorical questions:

If a plane were to fall from the sky
How big a hole would it leave
In the surface of the earth?

Well, it would leave a big hole. About as big as the plane itself. Occasionally, however, Editors throw off a powerful image or two:

My dirty hands
Have I been in the wars?
the saddest thing I've ever seen
Were smokers outside the hospital doors.

Yes, there is a subject-verb agreement issue in that last sentence. But only lower-case editors care about that sort of thing.