The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Editors

[#] In This Light and On This Evening (2009)

London deserves a little better, no?

Reviewed September 7, 2026

Talk about disappointing! I consider The Back Room to be my finest $1 used CD purchase—In This Light and On This Evening may be my most unfortunate £1 used CD purchase. Given that my girlfriend's family enjoyed the former as much as I did, I was really hoping to find another cache of darkly smouldering gems for their car playlist and only came away with this gloopy Eurythmics-go-goff pablum instead. Editors trade their guitars for 80s keyboards here, but they also seem to trade any of the optimism and catchiness that offset The Back Room's inner demons for a gloomy self-seriousness that borders on parody.

I want you to imagine a genuinely strong, booming British singing voice insisting to you that "it kicks like a sleep twitch" is a lyric good enough to be repeated eight times. I know rock is immature at the best of times, but I simply cannot take DeviantART poetry like "You ran with the dead today/With the moles from the C.I.A." and "Damn the summer flowers/They took what once was ours" over dark neon synth lines with a straight face. It's not particularly haunting, nor that catchy, save for sole properly good ballad "The Big Exit" and the awfully-named single "Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool", where the danger and romance Tom Smith and company reach for all record finally lie in their black fingernail grasp.

Essential:	"The Big Exit", "Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool"
Quintessential:	"You Don't Know Love"
Non-Essential:	"Like Treasure"
Rating: