What’s this? I Like Trains go electro? Well, not quite, but they’ve definitely continued to expand their sound on album number three ‘The Shallows’, revealing an even more overt pop sensibility than its predecessor, ‘He Who Saw the Deep’. Opener ‘Beacons’ is propelled by an oscillating sequenced bassline overlaid with gently eddying synths, over which Dave croons like an arch-gothic Neil Tennant. There’s even an eighties Cure style chopstick motif in the mix.
There’s a definite eighties feel to the album as a whole. They’ve also managed to replicate that smooth, reverby production from that decade, although they’ve always been masters of reverb. The compositions are still distinctively ILT, with delicate interweaving guitars defining the sound nowhere more than on the title track.
To bemoan the passing of the epic crescendos would be futile: they exhausted that format with ‘Spenser Perceval’, and just as the lyrical subject matter has moved from rear-guard to forward-facing, so their sound is about progress (and even reform). While shunning the term ‘concept album’, ‘The Shallows’ is as much about the lack of depth of contemporary living as it is about bodies of water. As is perhaps fitting for a band that found themselves without a label after Beggars Banquet went bust and who funded their last two albums via Pledge Music, the press info tells us that ‘The Shallows’ tackles themes around information overload and ‘charts a history of how our tools have shaped us and asks how our recent reliance on digital technology to obtain information has changed the way we think and retain knowledge’.
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That isn’t to say they’ve abandoned all of their established lyrical trappings, with popular idioms and well-worn cliches floating to the surface in abundance. The difference is that here, they’re reconfigured and reapplied in a more contemporary context, against a sonic backdrop that reflects the subject matter: the future is, after all, retro.
I’d still point to their European tour supporting The Sisters of Mercy as a turning point not only in their career, but their sound (although the cover art more closely resembles a nod to Bauhaus) where ‘He Who Saw the Deep’ was markedly concerned with tight and succinct dark pop, so ‘The Shallows’ refines the brooding tension and redefines ILT as purveyors of moodiness delivered with a crisp edge, snaking its way through nine tracks with the sharpest and most unexpected ending to an album I can recall having ever heard.
The old hardcore might not like it, and even fans who came to the band that bit later may take a while to come around, but make no mistake, this is an accomplished album that rewards repeat listening.
I Like Trains Online
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