Editors show their split personalities at Wiltern
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Somewhere between the floor-shaking post-punk on Editors‘ first two albums and the black-polished synth-rock of their third, “In This Light and On This Evening,” there lies a band that could save your life. On Thursday, in front of nearly full house at the Wiltern, the British quartet fought mightily just to save the night.
They did, in the end, owing to a lightning-charged encore that ended with their 2005 hit “Munich,” the new single “Papillon” and an all-wires-exposed take on “Fingers in the Factories,” an album track from 2005 that showed the foursome at its most urgent and explosive.
- ||| Photos by Laurie Scavo
The remainder of the 90-minute set could have used some … well, editing. In commingling their bodies of work, frontman Tom Smith and crew leaned awfully heavily on keyboard-driven builds, stalling at times in pool of excess drama. Like many bands that trade in hyper-romanticism, Editors tread a fine fine between rigorously heartfelt and overwrought. (You might draw that line, for instance, somewhere between Interpol and She Wants Revenge.) Smith, nimble onstage and typically thunderous sounding, practically did somersaults to keep things moving, but Editors were best when the music provided the physicality.
Support band the Antlers, the NYC trio whose album “Hospice” earned a lot of love on best-of-2009 lists, failed to quell the chatty Wiltern crowd with their ambient soundscapes and glacial anthems. Simple chord progressions, billowy sheets of noise, yearning storytelling – they’re the elements used by generations of art-rock shoegazers; the Antlers’ brand is almost too polite, and with their moment memorable song “Two” exceeding six minutes, a bit long-winded. Even Paul Silberman’s brief between-song dialogue sounded like an NPR announcement.
Local quartet Princeton, the resident band this month on Mondays at Spaceland, opened with a set of their jaunty shoegaze-pop.
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