Editors
An End Has a Start

I'll get straight to the point: this is really beautiful.

Yes, because with this second album, the aforementioned Editors manage to engage in something more, musically, compared to their previous effort, but especially in comparison to other exponents of a musical genre that too often tends towards homogenization and repetition.

Instead, maturity is found, but with evolutionary potential, greater compositional attention, a new "epicness" in the singing and themes. Abandoning inconvenient and now languid "cousins" (see Interpol) to arduous paths of necessary renewal, the Editors carve out a precise and autonomous role in the musical landscape of the New-New Wave, if we really want to categorize; their gift is being able to convey emotions with an immediate and direct musical approach, yet never banal.

And perhaps some riffs sound similar across various songs.

And perhaps the effects on the instruments are more or less always the same.

But the melodies are robust and intense, of depth.

Uncomfortable themes: illness first and foremost; human annihilation at the arrival of manifestations of the time now past; the fall of body and spirit.

This is evident in the lyrics of the first track of the album, the wonderful "Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors", where the thought of sadness takes free rein when seeing a person ("smoker"? not necessarily), outside the hospital room door, waiting for news of an unfortunate loved one.

Or the pulsating TRACKLIST "An End Has A Start", where perhaps the same person promises the loved one not to disappoint them in support.

The anguish of losing a loved one turns into a self-destructive instinct in the song "The Racing Rats", in which a protagonist, now drunk, watches street rats chase each other to distract himself and aims to race with them.

Other episodes like "Escape The Nest" or "Spiders" are not forgotten.

More than convincing.

Mature.