Words: Gareth O’Malley

‘Uptempo’ is not a word you would associate with I Like Trains. The band have become well-known as one of the most maudlin acts in the country, having spent a few years peddling their post-rock influenced songs that have been noted for Guy Bannister’s baritone vocals - and a startlingly bleak view of the world.

Yet some of the songs on their second album could indeed be classed as uptempo, and perhaps even uplifting. Lead single ‘A Father’s Son’ takes its cue from such bands as Arcade Fire, steady drum patterns intertwining with a driving bass line, producing a kind of catharsis that hasn’t yet been heard in any of the quartet’s work.

Even ‘Sea of Regrets’ - a song that begins with the line, ‘Some things are better left forgotten, or the weight of the world will crush your bones’, ends on a high note, its soaring climax giving way to a four-minute instrumental coda that brings the track close to a level of beauty not heard in an I Like Trains song since ‘Terra Nova’ off ‘Progress-Reform’.

Despite this, ‘He Who Saw The Deep’ is still rooted in good old-fashioned English miserablism. The listener is confronted by all sorts of despondent imagery: Europe ‘slips into the sea’ in ‘Progress Is A Snake’; and ‘Broken Bones’ finds the protagonists ‘climbing mountains to buy themselves time / Only to find, to their surprise, that the higher they climb, the further they have to fall’. There’s even a song here with the cheerful title of ‘Hope Is Not Enough’.

The mood is one of defeatism, of a band grown disillusioned with the world, and this makes this concept album (based on a sea voyage) a rather unsettling listen. Just how unsettling it is doesn’t hit home until ‘Doves’ draws to a close with a line that’s among the most disturbing put to tape this year: ‘Nothing says it’s over quite the the way you hit the sea’. As Bannister has adopted an altogether more hushed style of singing, his whispered delivery makes the song’s finale truly chilling.

Their sound may have become more widescreen, and the melodies more expansive, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the I Like Trains manifesto: ‘we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, so let us provide the soundtrack’.

8.0

Audiovisuals: A Father’s Son