iLiKETRAiNS - 'Progress Reform' (Fierce Panda) Released 03/07/06

Leeds five-piece iLiKETRAiNS are a band deeply concerned with arcane history. Not only does their debut mini-album deal with early Antarctic expeditions (recent single ‘Terra Nova’) and 1960s railway closure plans (‘The Beeching Report’), but it’s practically a one-band shoegazing revival. 

That may sound like a backhanded compliment, but if this album is anything to go by perhaps staring at one’s footwear is conducive to great musicianship. Plectrum-on-string never sounded so lush, and behind the walls of reverb lurk gorgeous songs that prove the band have got plenty of substance underneath their shimmer. Foreboding and unsettling as they are, Progress Reform’s seven tracks have a glacial beauty that would be well suited to that polar expedition, with post-rock noise crescendos that could cause an avalanche.

One such example of this is the first single to the taken from the album, ‘A Rook House For Bobby’. Detailing the mental decline of former chess world champion Bobby Fischer (there’s that arcane history again), it’s one of the darkest songs Gigwise has heard all year. With almost Wagnerian orchestral majesty and dynamics torn straight from the Godspeed! You Black Emperor handbook, the only thing that lets it down is a horrendous drum sound. Unfortunately, this is something that much of the record suffers from, hopefully to be corrected by the time the band release their debut album proper.

The rest of the album is a lesson in Nick Cave gothicism, with ‘Stainless Steel’s eight minutes a prime example.  Opening with the line “Please don’t go into the kitchen, that’s where the knives are”, it’s both the literal and metaphorical tale of knife in the back betrayal that its title alludes to. When you also know that the band wear British Rail uniforms onstage and play in front of antique projections of trains, snow, and chess games, you can imagine the sort of strange, living-in-the-past characters that created this music. And if they keep producing records this good, it won’t be long before iLiKETRAiNS are in the history books themselves.