This wonderful singular album, arriving after four years of painstaking forward progress by iLiKETRAiNS, feels to me like a record that demands a lot of space and a lot of time from anyone who wants to claim to have listened and heard. Inventing an impressionistic electro-folk music, with complete textual, visual and emotional presentation from a standing start and putting themselves in a place where almost anything could follow is an achievement beyond one-line plaudits. The lyrical themes, the music, the intensely minimalist songs, the production, artwork and supporting essays are self-made and knowingly high-risk. Many will turn away in ragged flurries of attention deficit. Some will pick the fleas from perceived rats of non-conformance, decrying efforts to find new possibilities in literate vernacular music.
Not me.
I have my neck right there on iLiKETRAiNS' iron block. I love this album to death and I think I know why.
For one, it makes no attempt to soften any blow or beguile any passing innocent into its deep waters. The basic band sound is a monochrome of least detail. There are long progressions, impossibly stretched arpeggios, ominously cumulative drumming and the richest, simplest bass lines; with a phial of digital delay spinning out threads of the finest precision-made wire from shining guitar lines. David Martin's deep incantation of a voice sustains a narrative commentary on the edge of each madness that the words so cryptically report.
For two, the subject matter (history to a superficial reading) is the monomaniac self delusion (and in one case the sacrifice) of otherwise insignificant and unheroic souls whose errors and tragic downfalls prefigure our own. The irony of "lessons learnt" needing elegies might be missed but the album announces itself as songs of mourning for the lessons we might have had. These are lessons that are now lost, dead and buried. We have no more learnt from them than did the characters whose despair flickers to us through these songs and these raging guitars. Wretched retreat from Afghanistan? Absurd over-confidence in technology? Craven desire to be famous? Opportunist self-serving disloyalty? Hopeless delusion in religious self sacrifice? Power calculating its own interests, refusing relief in disaster? Mob justice against an innocent immigrant? Frantic destruction of a community to avoid self-knowing? These are the background stories, buried not just in time but also in the brevity and mystery of the lyrics. Only deeper knowledge (a book of essays has been prepared for those who seek it out) can fathom the mundane detail in these tales. They don’t come on a pitchfork. They come through music that might capture their souls and then burn their effigies into the long memory of our emotions.
For three, the sparely done additions of musical shading provide glorious moments of tingling hope and release. Lucy Deakin's cello, Helen Clarke's violin, Rob Paul Chapman's lugubrious trombone and Mark Thompson's clarion trumpet make "Come Over" a glorious last feast before the final three tracks. On the chillingly beautiful "Death Is The End" a choir that includes James Mabbett (NAPOLEON IIIrd) and Katie Harkin (SKY LARKIN) and an organ part played by Katherine Botterill raise the fragile spirit, even as "rotting flesh is the end" is intoned by arch-villain Martin in his richly restrained and seductively emotional lament. I especially enjoy the frequent use of triple time, adding the eroticism of dance to the funeral marches of the slow tempos. What could be morbidly Gothic and teenaged is given the adult/child option of swaying gently to soothe the inherent misery.
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It is to the band's great credit that earlier work, strong though it was, has been left in its own past. Recent singles "Spencer Perceval" and "The Deception", are the two familiar songs on the album, the rest is very new. The result is that for a debut major album there is an unusual evenness and freshness of tone and content. I heard the album, on first acquaintance, as a single work. I still feel interrupted and incomplete if I don't get the whole album in one go..
Just before the album's finale an instrumental interlude "Epiphany" holds our attention still for a last reflection and calm before the dramatic bleakness of "Death Is The End". At the start of a brief five minutes and 21 seconds, cello and piano prepare the ground for a steadier march to a simple beauty of decay and annihilation. The song gradually fills with strings and voices, like a lifetime's memories crowding in to exact our desperately offered repentance: where we had guitars building each immaculate crescendo, we now have the humanity. Oh, The Humanity! And in the release of the choir's last echo, the lonely whisper "It is the end" is carried out on an exceptionally long fade of piano, bass and organ. Inverting the expected iLiKETRAiNS template of a loud ending, this one is so quiet you will need to be very still and very patient to hear it at all, even half way through its fifteen seconds of slow decay.
Perhaps you should play the whole thing far far louder than I dare? Loud enough to wake the dead. There are cavernous and scary sounds throughout, some raw and ragged with energy, some lovingly coaxed and gently placed. Meticulous. I'm already starting my campaign to have the damnable thing nominated for the 2008 Mercury Prize. UK music needs some intelligence back into the centre of things, and this has the muscle to bring it. It also has the sense of humour to smile benignly at lightweights and trend abusers who would like to stifle it as with instant understanding. Take your time.
www.iliketrains.co.uk
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