Album: Editors <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

The Back Room, KITCHENWARE

Like so many of the new wave of British and American bands, this debut from the hotly tipped Editors reminds one of an older new wave whose innovations have been "borrowed" lock, stock and barrel, with little apparent extra input from the band. As with The Killers, the piercing, anthemic guitar rock of Editors' "Lights" and "Munich" simply makes me wonder whether this younger band will fare better with its Echo & The Bunnymen tropes than Ian McCulloch has managed for the past decade or two. As for "Blood", with its rhyming of "process" and "promise", and its claim that "This wicked city will drag you down", it's hard to recall a song that more brazenly apes the sombre, dystopian rush of Joy Division - unless it's the ensuing "Fall", which even borrows certain chord clusters from "Shadowland" (I think) in its attempt to span the gap between early-Eighties industrial indie-rock and the stadium-sized mewling self-pity of Coldplay, Keane et al. Editors appear no better nor worse than their contemporaries in copying the musical styles and urban alienation of that era, but that's immaterial. If Joy Division and the Bunnymen had themselves so slavishly copied the modes of a quarter-century before, they would not even have been playing rock'n'roll, but bowdlerised light-entertainment pop. Are we wrong to expect the "new" to be new?