Editors – Bite The Bullet

Despite the band he fronts - Editors - reaching the top of the album charts with their second album, ‘An End Has A Start,’ just over two weeks ago, Tom Smith is not completely satisfied. “It’s been a strange one critically,” he muses, with an obvious hint of frustration, “we’ve had a lot of great reviews from what you would call respected publications and we’ve had great reviews from tabloid press and some of the kind of ‘lad mags,’ but we have had quite a few that were, well yeah, Q was a stinker to be honest. I don’t know, maybe some of them don’t like the direction, some of them don’t like the songs and some of them just don’t like us, which is fine, we can’t please everyone.”

I seem to have caught Smith - whose skinny frame is now topped off with shaggy curls that are far removed from the shaved head that he was sporting when Editors released their debut album, ‘The Back Room,’ in 2005 - on an unusually forthright day by his demure standards. The man known for his on stage exuberance and mind bending flexibility just can’t seem to get ‘An End Has A Start’s’ critical reception off his mind.

“What is puzzling me is that, of the bad reviews, there’s no kind of common things with the songs and stuff,” adds Smith, as he tries to summarise the critics’ mixed response. “For example, in the NME review it said the best song we’ve ever done was in the second half of the record picking it up towards the end and that was us really becoming a great band in the course of those five or six minutes. And in the Q review it was like the only songs that are worth listening to are the first three songs and the second half, or two-thirds of it, aren’t even worth listening to – it’s just bollocks from that point on. I don’t know, it puzzles me, but you have to remember that it is only one person’s opinion and you can’t worry too much about it.”

You can understand Smith’s puzzlement. For a band, or any performer, the album is the pinnacle – the permanently embellished memoir of their career. As live shows can pass as memories, it’s the album that survives indelibly in record shops, or these days, online.

And so, why has ‘An End Has A Start’ received such a mish-mash of critical assessments? Well mainly because the Editors that recorded the album just aren’t the same Editors that recorded ‘The Back Room’ – an album which, after initial success, eventually reached the dizzy heights of number two in the album charts when people began to realise that the Midlands band really had something quite alluring about them. Instead, they’ve evolved, with the production help of Garret ‘Jackknife’ Lee (who also re-recorded the euphoric version of ‘Bullets’ for the band) to a place which in parts is even more anthemic than their debut (‘The Racing Rats’) but in others, more minimal (‘Spiders’) than anyone would have expected Editors to be able to go. Even Editors themselves.

“With the record as a whole we tried to do new things and new sounds and not just have the four elements that are pretty much on the whole of ‘The Back Room,” explains Smith, as he talks about the new instruments – particularly the piano – that have come to the fore on the new album. “We wanted to try new things and push ourselves and a piano was one of them and picking up an acoustic guitar. I think on ‘The Back Room’ when we were recording it we’d have been a bit terrified to go near a piano, we’d have been like, ‘Oh you can’t do that, it’s ridiculous.’ But, a few years down the line let’s try and make a big, large textured record that has lots of different elements to it.”

While the album contains the expected big, “Editors-esque” moments, like lead single, ‘Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors,’ which features a chorus made up of the band’s friends, and next single, ‘An End Has A Start,’ it’s tracks like the aforementioned ‘Spiders’ and ‘The Weight of The World’ which are the “different elements” Smith is talking about. Rather than provide Editors usual immediate connection, they’re songs that are designed to burn slowly, yet more brightly with every listen. “You need to kind of emerge yourselves in them and for me as a listener,” reveals Smith, “of the records I get the most and find the most rewarding, like the new National record and the new Arcade Fire record, I have to immerse myself in it and live with it for a while and I hope people that love this record will, given time, not just love the instant singles or whatever.”

What he means is as much to do with the song’s lyrics as opposed to the more minimal construction. Not since Arcade Fire released their lyrically bleak but musically blusterous debut album, ‘Funeral,’ has a record been so inspired and shaped by death. Affected by a series of unexpected tragedies close to the band before and while they were recording the album, ‘An End Has A Start,’ is them more raw, more heartfelt, more open than ever. ‘Well Worn Hand,’ the album’s definitive closer, for example, was written after Smith heard the news that an old school friend had been tragically killed. In it, a near- tearful sentiment reverberates through his voice as he sings the lines, “I don’t want to go out on my own any more/ I can’t face the night like I used to before,” while the song is pushed along with just him on Piano and guitarist Chris Urbanowicz. “You might as well just shut the door, stay inside, never go outside when there are people in the world that can do that,” admits Smith, as he discusses the story behind the song. Editors may have always sounded humane in the past but this is them feeling truly human.