The Weight of Your Love… Wouldn’t weigh much

Review: Editors – The Weight of Your Love

Published on July 3rd, 2013 | Jonny Abrams

Editors enlisted the services of producer Jacquire King for their fourth album The Weight of Your Love – Jacquired his services, perhaps? – and the results tally with King’s ‘rep’ as the man who turned Kings of Leon into a rotten yet massively successful stadium rock act.

The Weight of Your Love is one of the most unnecessary indulgences you’re likely to hear all year, since Editors seem perfectly content to follow in oft-trodden footsteps while wearing the most prosaic shoes imaginable.

We’d try to cook up a better analogy than that but frankly Editors, for all that they seem to be nice blokes, don’t merit the effort.

At least Kings of Leon tried to make something relatively distinctive out of the otherwise ghastly likes of “Use Somebody” and “Sex on Fire”; The Weight of Your Love, on the other hand, gets gradually limper and limper as it wears on.

It’s the total opposite of a climactic effect and we’d call it a damp squib if we’d harboured any kind of expectation for it whatsoever. Editors, though, had already established themselves as a poor man’s Interpol, who in turn are a poor man’s Joy Division.

There you have it, then. Editors: the utterly bereft (nay downright destitute) man’s Joy Division.

Funnily enough, things start quite promisingly with the brooding sophistication of “The Weight”, in which Tom Smith delivers the killer line “I’m a lump of meat with a heartbeat / Electricity restarts me”. He may be trying to impersonate Nick Cave a bit too much but we’re surprised by how much we enjoy it nonetheless.

The ensuing “Sugar” is, contrary to its title, a bit of a stomping beast with its scuzzy, rummaging bass line, so you get to spend two whole tracks being mildly impressed before the boredom sets in.

Lead single “A Ton of Love” is where things start to go wrong, third-rate U2 that it is, while the punctuation-eschewing “What is This Thing Called Love” inadvertently reflects the wastefulness of its surroundings with the line “We built this city, now we tear it to the ground”.

Given Smith’s vocal histrionics, it’s almost impressive how insipid “What is This Thing Called Love” manages to sound. Several tracks then pass by without making any kind of impression before “Honesty” inflames Rocksucker’s allergy to power ballads.

“Two Hearted Spider” is a good song title but it just sounds like a not-very-good version of “Mad World”. That’s pretty much all that’s left to say about The Weight of Your Love, other than that it is a depressingly bloated indictment of an industry that sees fit to spunk goodness knows how much money on the likes of Editors when probably thousands of people are making better, more original and therefore more worthwhile music in their bedrooms.

Whoever’s in charge of these things either doesn’t have a clue or doesn’t give a shiny one. Which is the scarier prospect to you?

The Weight of Your Love is out now on Play It Again Sam.

You can buy The Weight of Your Love on iTunes or on Amazon.

Rocksucker says: One and a Half Quail out of Five!

a quail half a quail

About the Author

Jonny Abrams Editor of Rocksucker and the website's founder, Jonny is passionate about the music he listens to, both good and bad, as well as interviewing his favourite musicians.