Albums of 2015 (2/3)

Editors - In Dream

After something of a false start in 2013’s The Weight of Your Love, the band’s first outing as a five-piece, Editors seem to have found their footing and, crucially, found a workable sound for their fifth effort in total.

Rather than the tightly wound post-punk of their first two albums, or the drippy Americana of its preceding LP, In Dream sets the conceptual searchlights on the melodramatic pop of Ultravox, Depeche Mode and New Order – all but leaving the guitars in the cupboard, as with their third record, In This Light and On This Evening, which mined pretty much the same vein. However, unlike that album, there is a more appealing sense of identity here – a distinctly ‘Editorsy’ thread running through the 10 songs, an even mixture of dark comedy, high emotion and cloudbusting choruses.

Editors have often been unfairly maligned by the pettiest of indie music critics, usually for wearing mostly black and just-slightly-too-heavy a Joy Division influence (singer Tom Smith’s twitchy baritone usually held to account). However, influence from other artists is, as with all sources of inspiration in any artistic field, basically inescapable. And, to my ears, Editors have always had a bit more integrity about them than the bulk of their contemporaries.

It is unclear how much the band’s previous iteration came down to now-absent lead guitarist Chris Urbanowicz. He certainly brought the riffs to the party, infusing indie rock anthems Munich and Blood with their ear-tickling memorability through his wiry guitar work. But how much did his presence define, and limit, the band’s creative scope? Their last effort as a foursome was weighed down with layers upon layers of electronics, to the point where the core melodies were strangulated and, often, lost altogether.

In contrast, even The Weight... for all its faults, at least felt expansive and free in places. In Dream, with Editors having had a year to redevelop their chemistry, sounds like a band creatively beaming, enjoying a newfound sense of space. There is much less toe-treading and jostling for space, with each member instead content to take a back seat or step forward as the song dictates.

This can be heard most clearly in the sparse Tin Drum percussion of The Law - something of a duet with Slowdive's Rachel Goswell, who lends her hazy vocal quality to a few of In Dream's tracks, here providing the airy counterpoint to Smith's languid brooding. The similarly minimalist At All Costs has the frontman's pained musings on adulthood and loss tiptoeing on nothing more than percussive guitar stabs, gospel keys and haunting backing vocals - a far cry from the dense finery of Papillon. The result is a less fraught, less self-consciously searching album - a brave move for a band so at-times reliant on massive hooks, but an effective one.

That's not to say the hooks aren't here - but they are employed with a tact and subtlety that Editors have only rarely shown. All The Kings bounces on a triumphant Depeche Mode synth line and a low-end throb that lunges into fresh, altogether poppier territory. Life Is A Fear and Our Love consist of similarly immediate, bass-heavy melodies, driving like a knife through satin.

Perhaps the most radio-friendly tunes come in the album's opening twenty minutes, but these still have that same sense of self-belief, musicality and a typically dark patina. Not even Chris Martin, if he'd woken up on the wrong side of his Amazonian gold queen-size, could have penned tunes like Ocean of Night, Forgiveness or Salvation, despite their crisp piano based chord structures and crowd-pleasing choruses.

Smith's flexible vocals shift from his muscular baritone to a more developed falsetto, always seeming to have another gear to kick into. When he does take it up a level, his voice has a genuinely arresting, lump-in-the-throat electricity. But he is much more versatile, astute and, whisper it, mature - never overwhelming, barely ever taking bites out of the scenery as he has been prone to since 2007's An End Has A Start.

The singer's lyrics, always a sticking point, are also greatly improved - full of poetry, stories, colour and neat little turns of phrase, that complete the songs, rather than unnecessarily trying to convey any Big Ideas. He only gets a little too syrupy on closer Marching Orders - probably the album's only misstep, littered with decent ideas but feeling oddly unfinished, with a several-minutes-too-long electro finale that aims for euphoria but only reaches self-indulgence.

But that doesn't detract from what is perhaps the band's most solid, cohesive and confident piece of work since their debut. It is even better, in some respects - richer, sturdier, more nuanced, and (that dreaded M-word again) more mature. In Dream was created in apparent isolation, and this shows - the band seemingly happy to exist purely as the sum of their parts, with an unwavering singularity that underscores the songs, yet also lifts them aloft at the expense of any trace of vanity or ostentation. Editors still have their sights on the stratosphere - but here, they haven't forgotten to do the groundwork.