Review-Editors at Club Soda

Review of Editors live at Club Soda in Montreal on January 20th 2007

I arrived at Club Soda at 9:30pm (about an hour before I usually think about leaving the house for a show), forgetting that larger venues like Metropolis, La Tulipe, le National, and Club Soda actually start on time, and on time is early.

Here’s a quite satisfying online replacement for the part of the show I missed:

• Louis XIV
• Hot Hot Heat

As for the UK-bred headliner, I would say: dance punk infused bassy rock drums + 80s faux-synth guitar + baroque baritone vocals=Editors. My concerns with this equation:

1. Dance punk? If people would still like to play it, the drummer needs to be steadier, almost like a disco drum machine to pull it off. The rock dynamic that Editors embrace takes away from their potentially driving dance build-ups. And,
2. the pop dance dynamic takes away from the power of their rock music. At times, the lead singer, Tom Smith, re-enacted the Rock God motif by holding his guitar above his head and strumming dramatically or jumping in time to his playing. But Smith plays rhythm guitar, not lead, and his guitar wasn’t loud enough in the mix for these actions to be effective; they came across as air guitar.
3. The four-piece haven’t effectively found a voice to bring together their modern rock and 80s pop influences. Though Smith has a nice, full voice, his melodies lack the hooks that make stadium rock idiosyncratic at its best. His voice is impassioned and emotional, but the material he chooses to sing is unoriginal. The most interesting part of Editors’ performance was Smith’s limp hands while singing and the bass lines in a couple places. But I’m reaching out here.

Perhaps Editors don’t seek to break ground. Their music relies on volume, sudden stops, and repetition to convey its meaning. Though they bring together a variety of influences (a slower keyboard ballad, a polka beat), each song progresses by falling into the same pounding kickdrum rhythm. Smith’s lyrics gain an emotive quality only in their repeated context, and never convey sufficient meaning to be projected across such a large venue.

The crowd at Club Soda was a largely male grouping of 30 year-olds who reacted to the performance with eclectic dance choices; while some pumped fists and bopped heads, one couple slowdanced, and not far off a man humped the air. I don’t think that a crowd need necessarily adhere to unified conventions of genre dancing or entirely free itself from pre-existing norms of show appreciation. But as the communicator, even of old themes, Editors’ unsynthesized style produced a confused and only awkwardly expressive audience.

In conclusion, people seemed to have a good time. And Club Soda’s stage lighting was top notch. But beyond that, I would classify the show as an ineffective exchange.