Editors Reveal Details of An End Has a Start, Tour
An End Has a Start, the sophomore full-length from Birmingham brooders (or, if you will, poor man’s Interpol) Editors, will be released June 25 in the UK and the rest of Europe via Kitchenware. No word yet on a U.S. release.
Opening track "Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors" will get the digi-single treatment two weeks prior to End’s start in stores, with a tangible "Smokers" single coming June 18. A visit to the Editors page gets you a brief (like, almost Radiohead brief) video-clip of new track "Bones" to whet your appetite. Ew, you eat bones!
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Editors will scour the European continent for poor diction and misplaced punctuation for most of this summer. Maybe you wanna start with that whole "adding unnecessary vowels to words" thing, boys.
The start of An End:
Gloom sluts even by Northern English post-punk standards, Editors were the toast of 2005, at least in certain dimly lit, poorly furnished, disgustingly smoke-clogged garrets around the world. Sure, they sounded like Joy Division but with a little death disco in the drums, a little flash in the guitar and a salutary emotional resolve in Tom Smith’s voice, as in "Munich" ("It breaks when you don’t force it/It breaks when you don’t try" – such a simple line, yet tougher the longer you chew on it) or "All Sparks." On the second Editors album, An End Has a Start, the songwriting has moments, like "Bones" and "Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors." But the production goes soft, a sorry trend this year for U.K. bands’ sophomore albums (see Bloc Party, the Rakes, Kaiser Chiefs, etc.); 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.
ROB SHEFFIELD (Posted to Rolling Stone on June 13, 2007)