Editors:
In Dream (deluxe):
PIAS:
2xCD:
Out Now:
★★★★★★★½☆☆☆
Album number five heralds something of a crossroads for the ever-popular Editors. After the rather mixed critical reaction to preceding opus The Weight of Your Love, with its lack of obvious anthems (save for Sugar, perhaps) resulting in the first non Top 5 UK album in the band's eight year history, it comes as some relief that In Dream has far more complexity than its simplistic title suggests.
Lead-off track and first single No Harm is a typically brooding dark-wave grower with Tom Smith intoning that he's a 'go-getter', which is completely at odds with the weary funereal pace of the song. Obsessions of the murky deep waters of the man's psyche comes to the fore again on the livelier Ocean of Night, a resplendent song that somehow sounds like it was a product of its recorded birthplace - In Dreams was pieced together on the remote west coast of Scotland. It figures.
Forgiveness also employs big drums and powerful lyrical imagery while the resonant string-driven Salvation harks back to the album's opening gambit. Sounding like White Lies chummying up to Rage to Eden-era Ultravox, the electro-industrial pomp of Life is a Fear is sure to appeal to their European fanbase with the closer Marching Orders proving to be every inch the sort of rain-swept tear-jerker Smith and co have threatened to make for the last decade. "I will flicker with the flame", Smith opines. Well quite.
Only the clunky, clumsy The Law fails to stir this listener's mind, body and soul while At All Cost might be a piece of glum self-indulgence too far. But, if you invest in the expanded deluxe, you get some bonuses in the form of alternative versions of a handful of album tracks (Forgiveness is much sparkier here) and the agreeable Oh My World. A respectable return to the heydays of The Back Room and the third album In This Light and On This Evening.
In Dream (deluxe):
PIAS:
2xCD:
Out Now:
★★★★★★★½☆☆☆
Lead-off track and first single No Harm is a typically brooding dark-wave grower with Tom Smith intoning that he's a 'go-getter', which is completely at odds with the weary funereal pace of the song. Obsessions of the murky deep waters of the man's psyche comes to the fore again on the livelier Ocean of Night, a resplendent song that somehow sounds like it was a product of its recorded birthplace - In Dreams was pieced together on the remote west coast of Scotland. It figures.
Forgiveness also employs big drums and powerful lyrical imagery while the resonant string-driven Salvation harks back to the album's opening gambit. Sounding like White Lies chummying up to Rage to Eden-era Ultravox, the electro-industrial pomp of Life is a Fear is sure to appeal to their European fanbase with the closer Marching Orders proving to be every inch the sort of rain-swept tear-jerker Smith and co have threatened to make for the last decade. "I will flicker with the flame", Smith opines. Well quite.
Only the clunky, clumsy The Law fails to stir this listener's mind, body and soul while At All Cost might be a piece of glum self-indulgence too far. But, if you invest in the expanded deluxe, you get some bonuses in the form of alternative versions of a handful of album tracks (Forgiveness is much sparkier here) and the agreeable Oh My World. A respectable return to the heydays of The Back Room and the third album In This Light and On This Evening.