Seen Your Video: Editors, Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool”
Posted by David Medsker (04/20/2010 @ 3:47 pm)
“Steamboat Willie”-style insects running a freakish post-apocalyptic assembly line. There is no other way to say it: this is one of the creepiest videos we’ve ever seen. Cool, but creepy.
The song, though, is one of our favorites from Editors’ most recent album, In This Light and On This Evening. Kind of like a modern-day “Being Boiled”…with eyeball-removing insects. Yikes.
Embedding is disabled for us American Anglophiles, so to see the video, you’ll have to click here. Trust us, it’s worth a look. Bonus points if you go back for seconds.
Posted in: Alternative, Artists, CD Reviews, Electronica, Rock, Seen Your Video, Videos
Tags: Being Boiled, Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool, Eat Sleep Drink Music, Editors, Editors video, ESDMusic, Headlines, In This Light and On This Evening, Seen Your Video, Steamboat Willie
Editors: In This Light and On This Evening
Posted by David Medsker (01/14/2010 @ 8:00 am)

RIYL: Joy Division, Peter Murphy, Shriekback
Editors have stood out from their UK peers by doing the most unlikely thing: staying the same. In an age ruled by extreme makeovers, Editors followed their 2006 breakthrough The Back Room with an album almost exactly like it (2007’s An End Has a Start), and were rewarded with their first #1 album in the UK and their highest-ranking single.
Then a funny thing happened: they grew positively bored with what they were doing.

Cut to present day and In This Light and On This Evening, Editors’ third album, where the band chucks the guitars for a wall of synthesizers and in the process makes an album that is absolutely unlike anything they have done before and yet right in line with everything they have done before. The songs carry the same epic feel of their best work – lead single “Papillon,” for one, has a mile-wide chorus – but the new tools they use to build those songs have opened the playbook considerably. The melodic high keyboard line in “Bricks and Mortar” serves as a secondary vocal, while the delicate “The Boxer” touches upon ideas that would have been completely foreign to the band last time around. “Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool,” meanwhile, could be this generation’s “Being Boiled,” a relentless piece of minimalist electro that stacks on some real drums for dramatic effect.
As remakes go, In This Light and On This Evening is the type that will impress both the casual Editors listener and the diehard. Even better, the band has put themselves in a position to take their next album in any direction, and it would appear to be a logical progression from here. Quoth the prophet Sheryl Crow, a change will indeed do you good. (Fader 2010)
Editors MySpace page
Click to buy In This Light and On This Evening from Amazon
Posted in: Alternative, Artists, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Dance, Electronica, Gothic, Melodramatic, Pop, Rock, Widescreen
Tags: Being Boiled, Eat Sleep Drink Music, Editors, Editors CD review, Headlines, Human League, In This Light and On This Evening, In This Light and On This Evening CD review, positively bored with what they were doing
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack: The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Posted by David Medsker (10/20/2009 @ 2:30 pm)

RIYL: Vampires, werewolves, everlasting love
Say this for soundtrack supervisor extraordinaire Alexandra Patsavas: with the soundtrack to “New Moon,” the second installment in Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, she leaves nothing in the bag, as it were. With a lineup chock full of megastars and indie darlings, New Moon is the most ambitious soundtrack to come down the pipe in a while. It’s also decidedly more grown-up than its predecessor, forsaking teen angst poster children Paramore and Linkin Park for the moody stylings of Bon Iver (teamed up with St. Vincent here), Sea Wolf, and Grizzly Bear. Muse is the only returning act – expect them to appear on the soundtrack for every “Twilight” movie, as Meyer is a devout fan – and it’s a doozy, as “I Belong to You,” from their latest album The Resistance, is punched up and, more imporantly, edited down (no piano break, woo hoo!). Thom Yorke delivers the wonderfully minimalist electro brooder “Hearing Damage,” and Patsavas scores a massive coup by securing the first new song by OK Go in four years, the endearingly oddball “Shooting the Moon.”

The biggest problem with the soundtrack is the sequencing. It will surely make sense in context with the movie, but as a straight-through listen sans visuals, it’s awfully up and down. All quibbling aside, New Moon is far better than anyone had a right to expect it to be, growing up along with its audience. Bravo, Alex. (Chop Shop/Atlantic 2009)
Twilight: New Moon MySpace page
Click to buy New Moon from Amazon
Posted in: Alternative, Artists, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Electronica, Folk, Gothic, Melodramatic, Pop, Rock
Tags: Band of Skulls, David Medsker, Death Cab for Cutie, Eat Sleep Drink Music, Editors, Grizzly Bear, Headlines, Lykke Li, Muse, New Moon, New Moon soundtrack, New Moon soundtrack CD review, OK Go, Sea Wolf, Team Edward, Team Jacob, The Killers, Thom Yorke, Twilight
White Lies: To Lose My Life
Posted by David Medsker (03/20/2009 @ 12:06 am)

Think of White Lies as the Menswe@r of the latest UK rock movement; there is nothing particularly wrong with them, but the combination of timing (they don’t have it) and chops (they have enough to get by) saddles To Lose My Life, the band’s debut album, with one heck of an uphill battle. Their earnest, widescreen melodrama will fit snugly next to your Editors and Interpol CDs, and the title track, with its unforgettable lyric “Let’s grow old together, and die at the same time,” is sure to rope in a lovestruck Goth kid or two. It’s all perfectly pleasant, and they even reach for Julian Cope levels of bombast on “Nothing to Give,” but it’s lacking that transcendant moment where the band rises above its influences to deliver something extraordinary. As debuts go, it’s unassuming – which went out of style with the advent of Soundscan – but so was Travis’ first album. Let’s see where they go from here. (Geffen 2009)
White Lies MySpace page
Posted in: Alternative, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop, Rock
Tags: Editors, Interpol, Julian Cope, To Lose My Life, To Lose My Life CD review, White Lies, White Lies CD review
|