Our editor’s pick of the albums reviewed on these pages during the past week is I Like Trains‘ new record KOMPROMAT – revisit the review and have a listen via Spotify:
“If paranoia had a sound, what would it be? The echo of footsteps behind? The whir of a CCTV camera as it turned its facial recognition sights on you? The rustle of gloved hands going through your rubbish?”
“I Like Trains have spent the intervening eight years since the release of their last album The Shallows (2016’s A Divorce Before Marriage soundtracked their own documentary) watching on from the sidelines in their home city of Leeds, quietly marking up the erosions in freedom and privacy which have been the sacrifice every citizen has had to make for trans-Atlantic nationalism.”
“Forming in the early noughties over a mutual love of Joy Division, The Birthday Party, Television and The Velvet Underground, for the quintet the embers of KOMPROMAT – the Russian term for compromising political material – can be found in the state secrets former American spook Edward Snowden leaked in 2013. The revelations they contained of moral corruption, shotgun diplomacy and the abrogation of national and international law became, as singer David Martin has said, ‘the album’s theme’, one which they interpolate throughout an exercise that trusts no-one.”