iLiKETRAiNSPOTTiNG

Away from the Brit-pop inspired frivolity of Kaiser Chiefs, the edgy indie-punk of The Cribs and the post-hardcore rumblings of iForward Russia!, there’s something very dark brewing in Leeds. Slow-brooding, epic and covering subject matter that most bands wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, with three very low-key releases under their belts coupled with mesmerising live performances, iLiKETRAiNS have already gained an impressive almost cult-like status. Gigwise caught up with frontman Dave Martin at the start of a year which will see the band step out of the shadows…

Definitely not your run-of-the-mill group, tellingly Dave admits that by choosing their self-professed nerdy name they were consciously trying to divorce themselves from the rock ethos, “The meaning’s quite self-explanatory really. We were trying to think of the least rock and roll name and that one came out top!” Evidently, visually too, their name with its mix of upper and lower case letters stands separates them from the crowd, as Dave explains:  “It’s for the aesthetics really. If you wrote ‘I like trains’ as it is then it looks a bit bland, so our way definitely looks a bit more interesting. I suppose another meaning is that it’s for the little ‘i generation’ with iPods and all that.” Profound.

For those of you unaccustomed to iLiKETRAiNS’ music - it’s nothing short of breathtaking. Pulsating post-rock of the same ilk of Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor is layered with Dave’s dark intonations about tragic humans from down the years, as he succinctly explains: “They’re generally pretty dark stories of tragedy and the underdogs in life… that get loud near the end… We’re not really pandering to a sound. There’s a lot of bands doing that eighties revival thing which we don’t really buy into.” Most recent single ‘A Rook House For Bobby’ dissected the sad story of the unhinged chess champ Bobby Fischer who exiled from his own country for visiting Yugoslavia eventually ended up in a Japanese prison dreaming of a house shaped like a rook - all set to a fraught web a musical tension. Hardly the next ‘Na na na na na’ is it?

Thankfully, Dave confirms that forthcoming material the band are working on is cut from the same cloth, with the next person in their sights being Scott of the Antarctic. He says: “There’s two songs we’re working on about Antarctic exploration. One’s about Scott of the Antarctic when he was beaten to the South Pole by the Norwegians, then his team died on the way back. The other one’s about a member of the Norwegian team who was kicked off by the leader just before they set off to the South Pole, it’s quite a sad song – they all get back as heroes and he’s just ignored by the people.”

Explaining why the band always opts for “historical underdogs” who are, as he describes, “the victims of progress”, Dave elucidates: “I suppose we’ve grown in to looking at things longer ago than the past 20 years. If we did things more recent there may still be people still alive and family members to get upset who may remember things more vividly and know things better than we could portray in our song.”

Of course, such an off-kilter band with some obvious parallels to other post-rockers may well get some peoples backs up, but Dave is rightly quick to defend their sound:  “Over the past two years, there’s been a complete organic evolution really. Me and Guy started out pretty much as a two piece playing twee acoustic songs that were a bit like Belle and Sebastian and Kings of Convenience. Gradually, we discovered that we actually quite liked making a lot of noise and our sound developed naturally. We weren’t listening to Mogwai and Godspeed at the time, it just turned out that our music had parallels to them inadvertently.” Instead, the real artists that helped mould their sound came from elsewhere, “I think that musically Sigur Ros and lyrically Nick Cave helped us really to turn round the corner.”