Two-fer Tuesday: "An End has a Start" Editors and "†" Justice

Everyone is still comparing Editors to Interpol. I wanted to as well, when I found out that the two bands would be releasing albums a mere seven days apart. However, I didn't plan to finally notice a difference. It's a solid bet that if you're an Interpol fan you enjoy Editors, and vice-versa, but I think that critics often take the easy way out and say that Editors are riding Interpol's coattails. That might have been true, to an extent, with the debut by the Editors, "The Back Room", which was basically a note-for-note reinterpretation of "Turn on the Bright Lights", but with their latest releases the two bands noticeably diverge. Interpol have stayed comfortably in their dimly lit hipster bars, safely ensconced in their tight jeans and the knowledge that they're easily the coolest guys in the room. Editors, however, take their second album out to a wide-open field and shout to the heavens. Tom Smith's soaring vocal lines in tracks like "Bones", "Escape the Nest" and the title track, "An End Has a Start" are all an homage to the long and illustrious history of British leading men and their innate ability to send their voices to heights rarely seen by mortals. The quiet moments, while few, are where the band shows it's weakness, the voice that can shatter ceiling beams becomes brittle in itself, lacking any sort of punch, especially in the album closer, "Well Word Hand." Perhaps they thought it was an easy way to ease us out of the album, but the band could have had a much more powerful close with the exquisitely satisfying buildup of "Push Your Head Towards the Air." Hopefully with their next album they continue to diverge from their genre-mates, Interpol, but not so far that they become something entirely different.

Editors Official Site
Editors on MySpace
Buy "An End has a Start" on Amazon.com

"Bones" Editors
"Push Your Head Towards the Air" Editors

Justice were supposed to be the next Daft Punk. They're both French, they're both duos, they both have supernatural abilities with beats, but somewhere along the line Justice lost their way. I was blown away with the lead single, "D.A.N.C.E." and the accompanying video, but when I was finally able to hear the whole album, and the single in context, I was quite disappointed. This pair of knob-twiddlers went from Gambit and Wolverine to Jubilee and Aquaman. The tracks bleed from one mediocre, boring song into the next, with little to distinguish one from the other outside of the particular choice of production effects. A track like "Dvno" features a painful voice spelling out the gibberish letters and a repetitive backing track. At other moments, like during the marathon of "Phantom" and "Phantom pt 2" they don't seem to possess the ability to let a sample play straight through, looping it sideways and backways and upsidedownways to the point of becoming maddening in it's repetition. Maybe that's what the two were aiming for, an album that is frustrating in it's repetition, to create tracks that loop so much you don't know where it ends or begins, a track you just want to grab at both ends and pull it straight across a table, at least then you can get it to end. Oh well, I guess I'll just go put on "Discovery" and space out.

Justice on MySpace
Justice on WikiPedia
Buy "†" (or as they call it, "Cross") on Amazon.com

"D.A.N.C.E." Justice
"Dvno" Justice

And here's that kick ass video: