It's surely a sign of advancing age, but your reviewer must admit to some amusement when he gets told that some new band is "the new Joy Division" by some young whelp who wasn't even a gleam in his parents' eyes when Ian Curtis killed himself.
Besides, when some of the supposedly Joy Division/ New Order-influenced bands out there are as laughable as the likes of The Departure, it really gets hard to take this stuff seriously. However, for all the bluster surrounding this spurious new 'scene', it's fair to say Birmingham's EDITORS are a decent enough band, who are forging a convincing enough sound that's actually probably more in hoc to the likes of The Chameleons and The Sound as it is to my beloved Mancunian overlords.
The previous Editors single "Bullets" made a convincing case for their continued existence, and indeed "Munich" makes it abundantly clear there's more where that came from. Produced with some clarity and power by Jim Abbiss (UNKLE, The Music), "Munich" is a strident affair buoyed up by busy'n'brooding rhythms and big, glacial, Chameloenic guitars. Vocalist Tom Smith has some presence, too, and the way he delivers the lines "People are fragile things, you should know by now/ be careful what you put them through" is moodily charismatic.
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"Munich", then, suggests Editors might just have the staying power to outlast the pack once the current bandwagon has run out of juice. It's still early days, and this writer would naturally baulk at sweeping statements until at least there's an album out there, but certainly the signs for Editors' future development augur well enough for now.
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