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.
In an age when many bands who feel the same have adopted an aggressive attitude by which to get cut through, the weapons here are more covert, opener A Steady Hand replete with icy, Soviet-era synths and nervous guitars, Martin singing emotionlessly, ‘I’m a stranger in my own country/I dance and they watch me’, as if on stage at a traitor’s party being held in a champagne gulag.
Other phases are musically more orthodox, the unrelenting guitars and bass of Desire Is A Mess and Patience Is A Virtue echoing the unfiltered polemic of their home city’s alumni Gang Of Four, while on Dig In they take this sound – which so lends itself to expressions of anger and energy and abandonment – to a blackly ecstatic conclusion.
Perhaps this could point to an orthodoxy the content shouldn’t permit, but in Eyes To The Left, featuring Exploded View’s Anika, the quintet instead sound like Moby accompanying the artificially intelligent voice of a system gone utterly wrong.
The album’s centre-piece however is undeniably The Truth, six-minutes-plus of stripped back, DFA chasing funk which turns the cynicism and dedication to self-serving chaos of political leaders everywhere into danceable character assassinations. To a backdrop of black-suited operatives dancing to the noise from their earpieces, Martin deadpans like a newsreader as the lies and distortion pile up over scabrous post punk disco.
Striking a balance between megaphoning your audience and letting them draw their own conclusions is one which I Like Trains have evidently spent time off the grid coming to terms with; emotionlessly will for some not go far enough in its condemnations, but then again paranoia doesn’t really work like that and if they really are listening to everything, then as your confession you can simply play them this.
