Remember CD players? Me neither, but I found one in the corner of my room under a pile of women's clothing and a broken guitar. And that was fortunate because I needed one to listen to 'An End Has A Start', because it's copy protected to the max. More fool Sony, because it's just under 45 minutes – the perfect length to fit on a cassette. Remember cassettes? Me neither, but 'Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors' is the mother of all opening tracks, with pounding drums that say "Come and have a go" better than any cannon, an organ pacing its way to the inevitable screeching guitars that you know will be the weight behind this album's punch, and a curious invitation to "Pull the blindfold down / so your eyes can't see / now run as fast as you can / through this field of trees."
Hell yeah! I never knew I wanted to do that before! More than anything! And already I'm warming to what I thought would be an underwhelming second album from these unlikely Brummies, who've been swinging their thing from here to Frisco, selling as quickly and as quietly as the hottest of hotcakes.
'An End Has a Start' now seems a cold and foreboding headline, rather than the album-title-generator-bullshit it could pass for in the wrong hands. It's a credit to Editors that they can slip snippets of lyrical clout like so many pills into your gaping maw until you realise its call-the-doctor-or-21-grams-in-your-shorts time. We've all been there and it ain't pretty. "In the end all you can hope for / is the love you felt to equal the pain you've gone through". Ditto (no Beth), and moreover, who, in this day and age, doesn't agree with, "How can you know what things are worth / if your hands won't move to do a days work?"
Take the time to get to know this. There are sweeping epics clocking in at just under five minutes, and tense, urgent songs-to-be-shot-in-the-face-to, clocking in at... just under five minutes. Despite the seemingly limited scope of the Editors sound, their craftsmanship, the watertight production, and Tom Smith (surely a pseudonym)'s just-this-side-of-spiteful snarl makes for an album's worth of triumphs. At times it feels akin to being in a really good Sci-Fi movie: there are political overtones in amongst the personal paranoia. In fact, there's such a smog cloud of apocalyptic sorrow weighing down on this album that it makes it difficult to believe it's from the same world, let alone time zone, let alone time, as the wanky shenanigans of, say, The Fratellis. I know who I want on my billboards; this 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.
