Oh Manchester! So much to answer for! Editors sound very like the excellent Interpol, but then they drink from the same well. In both bands you hear the brittle guitars, pounding bass and portentous vocals of Joy Division and Magazine (and perhaps a little of Sheffield’s Comsat Angels too). This is no bad thing, as their debut album demonstrates.

The record contains all the singles to date. Recent single ‘Blood’ is an indie-disco sensation, with a dramatic, angry chorus. ‘Munich’ is even better, with its dancey beats, choppy guitars and instructional lyrics: “people are fragile things…be careful what you put them through”. Opening single ‘Bullets’ is shrill and sets its stall out nicely, but it’s not a patch on what has followed. ‘All Sparks’ is another cracker, with a catchy riff of chiming guitars while ‘Fingers In The Factories’ is fast and bitter: “the sun goes down on a broken town”. ‘Someone Says’ has the ghost of Ian Curtis playing around the vocals while on the slower ‘Fall’, the vocals sound a little like Guy Garvey. ‘Camera’, as the title suggests, is moody and widescreen-cinematic.

If you’re enticed, there’s a special digipak containing another CD (‘Cuttings’) of the B-sides from the first three singles. These are gentler and more experimental. ‘You Are Fading’ is the best of them, its hypnotic rhythm building up from a quiet start, and too good to be tucked away on the B-side of ‘Bullet’. ‘Release’, though, is big and ponderous and indicates an Embrace road that’s worth avoiding.

There’s probably at least a couple of minutes too much doom for comfort on ‘The Back Room‘ but the fierce energy and perfect source material make this an exciting, if not groundbreaking debut.

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