Music Bloggers Get The Wrong Kind Of Editors

Brian Raftery | May 21, 2007 3:20 am
There are a lot of inexplicable go-to obsessions in the music blogosphere: The constant album-cover polls, for example. And the non-stop use of the word “totally,” as in “I totally want to know what you think of this album cover!” But nothing is more aggravating than when a middling artist lucks into a dry record-release schedule and, by virtue of nothing else going on, suddenly becomes the BEST! BAND! EVER! This month, it’s Editors. What gives?

Musically, you can’t say anything about Editors that hasn’t already been said a million different times: The band sounds like Interpol. Not the groups that spawned Interpol–Chameleons, Joy Division, etc. Instead, Editors sounds as if it formed right after hearing “Slow Hands” on Radio 1. There are no other apparent frames of reference to be found in the band’s music, except on this new track, on which the group sounds as if it switched stations long enough to catch a Snow Patrol song.

But the problem here is not the Editors’ ho-hum music; rather, the fault lies with the music bloggers who get all breathlessly hot n’ bothered about whatever remotely alt-rockin’ guitar band comes their way. It’s been a few years since the yup-rock boom of ’03 to ’05–a period when Sufjan/Interpol/Death Cab/the Shins and the like were seemingly everywhere–and many a music blog aligned itself with that movement, only to watch it take a creative nosedive. In 2007, there are simply a lot more interesting things to listen to than a bunch of bookish white guys with guitars, especially when most of them so closely resemble those other bookish white guys with guitars.

And yet, the music bloggers soldier on, giving readers the hard-sell on bands destined to peter out after one or two so-so singles; at this point, they’re almost as delusional and hype-herpe’d as NME. So long as there remains an insatiable desire for something new to covert and champion, we’ll have boilerplates bands like Editors shoved down our throats (a process that, coincidentally, will make you sing like Paul Banks). It’s a stagnating turn of events. Scratch that: It’s a totally stagnating turn of events.