One of the first things you hear on the new album by Editors, “Surface, Echo & Sound,” is a deep breath. As the opener, also the title track, unfolds, it remains relatively unadorned: Tom Smith’s voice, acoustic guitar and some eerie background effects.
If you haven’t checked in with the UK band since its early years, when its throbbing, reverb-drenched sound slotted in nicely with Interpol, Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand and vaulted its first two albums to the second and first spots, respectively, in its home country’s albums charts, you might not recognize it. Gone is the icy distance of the early ’00s, and with the walls taken down, Smith sings from the heart, with instrumentation that sometimes sounds more suited for a pub singalong than an arena anthem. The worldview is still bleak, but it’s seen through clearer eyes.
“This living hurts,” Smith confesses in “Shadow,” backed by gently chiming electric guitar, light percussion and synthesizers. “It’ll always get dark/ It gets heavy down every road/ But there’s still a moon/ And I’m still your shadow,” he sings.
Over foreboding tom toms in the ironically named “Happiness,” Smith cryptically intones: “Did you figure it out/ Did you fuck you misunderstand/ Make the streets smell like Disneyland.” After riffing on Peter Pan and holy water, he concludes: “Do we notice the news/ Well, we’re too bored to be magnanimous/ Selfishly working on our happiness.”
The fuzzy bass and “Girls on Film”-esque guitars of “Much Love” are as close as we get to early Editors, but it’s restrained rock that fits the context of the album. “Butterfly Wings” is an airy ballad that is so without guile that it could work as a U2 or Dave Matthews Band song.
By “Seriously,” the penultimate song on “Surface, Echo & Sound,” Smith is singing things like “Pass me the helium,” “Paint my tonenails/ It’s OK to be beautifully gullible” and (gasp!) “It’s all good.” Maybe it’s an identity crisis? “No one knows who they are anymore,” he concludes.
The relative goofiness is short-lived, as Editors close the record as it started it with an emotive acoustic ballad with the dour title “The Hills We Died Upon.” Smith now is “wired up” and “knocked out.” But he sounds like someone who wants to live like the guy he was trying to be in “Seriously”: “Show me how to live carelessly/ Cos with all this time I go out my mind/ And with idle hands the devil makes plans.”
Rating: 77/81
“Call It In,” the second song,
Leave a Reply