A year after the single “Sea Of Regrets” and three years after the first album “Elegies To Lessons Learned”, this PledgeMusic supported album is a very important achievement, matching and transcending the qualities and scale of the debut. It seems that the buckling of thier label Beggars Banquet has made the band’s mettle even stronger. When the locomotive power of capitalist production and distribution has failed, a band has to turn its own wheels. Creation is slower this way, but the inexorable global “process of our age: Progress, Stagnation and Decay” can sustain itself for much longer in that first creative, phase. Remarkably, funding for the completion of the album and subsequent tour was raised within 24 hours of the PledgeMusic announcement. I Like Trains have a lot of dedicated admirers.
As before, we have close to 50 minutes of music, and again we have puzzles to unlock and depths to explore at our leisure. This time we have practical aesthetics ground up alchemically with personal, collective, political and ecological themes. Fragments of Biography and History have given way to Ecology, Philosophy and (do I detect?) Spiritual Awakening. Themes of pride, renunciation, salvation and hope swirl around in the familiar stage smoke and the thunder of Simon Fogal’s drumming. The brilliant illumination of Guy Bannister’s bright guitar drives clarity into the carefully sloped geological structures. David Martin provides the honeyed voice of doom and (even more than before), Alistair Bowis’s bass is outstanding in its richly melodic contribution. Synths (Alistair and Guy) and some strings and extra voices are woven, imperceptibly in some places, to enrich the textures and grace the emotional effect. A tantalising drift into nearly-harsh radiophonics at the very end of the album (suggesting perhaps a final turning off of all life support) is done with subtlety and with I Like Trains’ trade mark mastery of dynamics.
In my ears, the outstanding songs are “Sea Of Regrets”, “Broken Bones”, “Doves” and the new (almost pop) single “A Father's Son”. The video for the single uses the North Yorkshire coastline to good effect, with tantalising hints of global, local and personal history. Potash mines and their industrial exploitation, fishing cobbles based on Viking design and a pterodactylic creature viewed from the cliff top are gently situated in a story of a newly orphaned boy and his missing father. If the final moment doesn’t leave you with a lump in your throat, you probably weren’t paying attention.
Appropriately, the album itself has an inaugural live performance on October 14th at The Deep - further down that same North East coastline. To have decided on Hull’s wonderful ocean resource as a rock and roll venue, and then made the idea happen is a pretty inspiring achievement.
The songs, by the band’s account, are about planetary despoliation. They challenge us to take our moment in history more seriously. There is hope, expressed in the upward surge of these songs, flickering like the final stage set of a GOD SPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR gig in Bradford I remember from 1992. (I think some nascent Trains might have been in that audience.) Lyrically they are full of elemental imagery. Deep water, mountains, sleep, death, ships and sunsets recur. “Broken Bones” collects them all in the fullest expression. Without confronting these fundamental realities head-on, the songs tell us, renewal and rebirth will elude us, whether at a personal or a geo-political level. There are hints too of the band’s own autobiography in all this.
The album as a whole expresses degrees of ambivalence and uncertainty. The time signatures of individual songs alternate between 6/8 and 4/4 and keys move between major and minor. There are specific moments of elation and despair, as well as those delightful surprises like the syncopation of “Hope Is Not Enough”.
“Doves” is worth a special mention. The Snake has already been confronted in track 5. In this final song the evil one’s Old Testament counterpart, the dove sent off by Noah in the midst of environmental catastrophe, is invoked. The 3 minutes 24 of “Doves” are the bleakest,. most minimal moments of the album. There is no roaring crescendo this time: the opening is deathly quiet, with hints of a dawn. “No dress rehearsal, no third time lucky, empty handed you return” intones Martin. “no olive branches. We took our chances. Now they’re gone” is pretty stark. “Nothing says “its over" quite like the way you hit the sea” is as terminal as it gets. And then we notice that slow pulse of the Big Bang’s echo, gathering energy and alarm. Then nothing. The sublime music of all that has gone before frames this dead end as apocalyptic warning rather than glum prediction. It’s an invitation to start again, not a bald statement of futility.
But more than anything it’s a great album. I’m looking forward to the arrival of my vinyl copy.
