Editors
Editors - The Wedge - October 2005
Editors are big news. This is a band people really want to see and hear. The Wedge has been sold out for weeks and
the audience is a wide pallet of the gig-going community. The tension and expectation is apparent, starting to rise as soon as everyone has done the bar run after the last support. Editors take the stage with a quiet confidence and begin to roll out the material. A lot of the audience already seem to know the songs, which is very telling indeed. These songs are driven by the steady rhythms of industrial decay, inner city, like bleak landscapes with tiny but bright swatches of colour at poignant intervals. The sound is driving, pushing, with a tarmac solidity to the bass lines. It’s angular and sparse, more introverted than aggressive, ‘low’ in the Bowie sense of the word. 
The vocals have a darkness about the delivery, not quite gothic but definitely the sound of black bedrooms and cigarettes at windy, wet bus stops. There is a distance in the songs, as if the band are filming their own private movie. They shift from dirge-like passages to bright and almost poppy hooks. The stage demeanour matches these big atmospherics; there’s motion, but not to excess. It all seems to be part of some arcane inter-communication between the band, a code like the dances of bees. The band are so deeply involved in the noise they are making that the audience seem almost incidental to them. 
They lean over or into their respective instruments, clutching them like totems as they try to summon something from beyond themselves. The singer, whose spazzy movements have probably evoked a large percentage of the Joy Division comparisons, likes to wrestle with his guitar as if it's trying to strangle him from time to time. He’s lost in the music and so is everyone in the room, willingly or otherwise. It’s a sound that sucks you in, stranding you in someone else’s imagination for a while. Lost in a self-referential world that is as intriguing as it is disturbing. The claps for an encore continue over an intense final riff, looped and repeating through some piece of stage gear. The audience is well satisfied; whatever it was they came expecting to find, Editors have evidently delivered.
