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100This album is fucking brilliant – it made me want to cut my hair, paint the ceiling, fuck the postman and burn the disco down. So I did. Then I curled up in a corner, cried, and shat myself.
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With albums as strong as An End Has A Start, Editors may get the last laugh.
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An End Has a Start actually sounds like it was crafted as ten quite individual chapters of a long-running saga; surprisingly, though, it ultimately works better than its predecessor as a cohesive, flowing album.
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80Avoiding the ponderous repetition that dragged down songs like "Bullets" on the first record, they concoct a gentler, dreamier atmosphere with less apparent anxiety, and create a shadowy veil of sadness, shot through with hopeful transcendence.
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80Singer Tom Smith tempers his constant anxiety with flashes of optimism, his brittle nihilism with gooey sentiment.
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80Tom Smith's emotive vocals and the dense wall of guitars strike the perfect balance between moody, underground noise and more accessible, arena-bound rock.
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80The band's sophomore disc, which teems with drama and dark dollops of piano that swarm beautifully around singer-guitarist Tom Smith's clarion-call voice, continues to make good on the hype while again drawing on the past.
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We'll give the Editors the benefit of the doubt, thanks to majestic jems like 'Smokers Outside the Hospital Dooros' and the existential title track.
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It's nice to be reminded that the world is shit and we're all gonna die. Editors have mastered the form.
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This is a decent album; it bears a craftsman-like solidity and many fans will no doubt be satisfied (and, more than that, happy) with it. But An End Has a Start is simply not the best album Editors are capable of putting together.
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70Editors have acquired a sense of urgency and emotion they lacked on "The Back Room." [Aug 2007, p.98]
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70In places An End Has a Start is bleakly compelling; nevertheless, great swathes of the record strain towards a pasty arena-rock future.
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An End Has a Start turns out to be a pupae album--it's Editors stretching their sonic muscles, poking the first spindles of whatever new form they'll take out of their gloom-rock cocoon come album three.
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For all of its stadium aspirations and ggrand soundscapes, An End Has A Start runs together in a way The Back Room didn't. [Summer 2007, p.73]
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60By producing a more polished, more accomplished sheen while The Killers have roughed themselves up and forgotten to shave, the two bands have moved towards a middle ground where they're virtually indistinguishable.
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They are still too tied to their musical ancestors for any serious maturation to take place.
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50Occassionally, the songwriting does contain flashes of thoughtfulness.
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50It appears they have emulated themselves on their sophomore (and sophomoric sounding) effort.
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The songs get puffed and fluffed up but lose the wiry edge of "Munich," burying Chris Urbanowicz's guitar until it all sounds like Coldplay. Nice tunes, but louder, please.
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These 10 songs repeatedly strike the same dynamic and evoke the same vague drama, each sounding more perfunctory--and more soulless--than the previous.
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50An End Has a Start doesn't have the glorious indie-disco hits of Editors' debut, and its toned-down sheen leaves us wishing for more bite.
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49It's a shame that premature commercial success has sullied Editors' creativity, because An End contains its share of bright spots.
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40Tom Smith's stentorian baritone, irritating in its overenunciated approximations of gravitas, is better suited to some community-theater group than a rock band.
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A record that's so deathly serious that each of it's ten songs could be associated with its very own biblical plague.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 34 out of 44
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Mixed: 4 out of 44
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Negative: 6 out of 44
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8
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DavidH.8
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DecepticonPom5M'eh!