Brit Music Scene

Editors Talk New Album - Defend Their Dark Lyrics & Sound

Posted: 23 Jul 2009 12:36 PM PDT

Anyone who has ever listened to an Editors album will know that there isn’t much light frivolity present in their lyrics or sound. In fact, they are rapidly becoming known for their dark, haunting, and sometimes quite depressing songs. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Especially when that’s what natural to the band, and doesn’t every great band write about what they know and about how they feel?

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The Back Room and An End Has A Start are both magnificent albums that deserve to be listened to and truly understood. But many people just can’t get past the moody, morose quality inherent in most Editors tracks. Will new album, In This Light And On This Evening, manage to lighten the mood and grab Editors new fans who are more at home listening to feel-good rock and pop music?

In a word, no.

Writing on the Official Editors Web site, lead singer Tom Smith talked about the new album, revealing that there are only nine songs on it, even though the band recorded 20. He also spoke about the feeling present through the album, which is yet again, dark. But Smith doesn’t care that critics of Editors want the band to cheer up. To him, dark is where it’s at.

He said:

“This is still a dark record, a record that sings of no God, a record of broken love songs, a record where the filthy city is so close you can smell it, taste it, a record of drunken violence, a record which has lost all trust in those in charge of our world. We must be four miserable people to make a record like this though right? I must be troubled to write words like these?….No, absolutely not, dark is interesting, dark is exciting, dark can be funny, there's real life in the dark, real life IS dark, when an album feels like this the fragments of hope and love that do occasionally shine through shine through ten times brighter than they would normally do so. I am so fucking bored of people asking us why we're so "dark", or worse questioning our integrity for being this way, this is how we do it, it excites us to express ourselves like this, to be honest we don’t even understand what the alternative is and the alternatives we can imagine are too boring for us to even consider.”

I couldn’t agree more with Smith because unfortunately, as he says, “real life IS dark”. So it seems slightly bizarre that most musicians instead choose to focus on the light and good almost exclusively. Sure, there’s a case to be argued where music is entertainment and entertainment should be a medium which induces happiness and joy. But you can have too much of a good thing, and Editors are the antidote to the cheesy pop which fills the charts these days.

I’m looking forward to In This Light And On This Evening, which is due to be released on September 21. OK, so listening to it may make me a little miserable and questioning of what life is really all about, but surely that’s better than a record which makes you a passenger, passively listening to meaningless lyrics. If you don’t agree, you should maybe avoid the new Editors album.

[Photo Source: Newscom]

Post from: Brit Music Scene