Reviews

Once again, Sennen put on a stunning live show, with the new material being tweaked and perfected every time.

It's no surprise that I was sceptical about their wish to show their more traditional song-writing techniques.

Sennen in silhouette

But they have managed to balance on the tightrope of longer compositions and the pop song, something that has lead many a promising young band to early radio deaths (see Hope Of The States' second album and consequential break-up).

The new songs have a lot more riffs, and consequently the crowd reacted in a more excitable way than at previous gigs.

Sennen have the sound of a band becoming truly happy with their material and direction.

Headline set

I Like Trains are trying to join two recently popularised strains of music: the eccentrically labelled 'lit-rock' of the Decemberists or Destroyer and the largely instrumental compositions of bands like A Silver Mount Zion and, indeed, the supporting Sennen.

The source material for their songs is always historical events or figures, and is darkly intriguing – a northern town destroyed by bubonic plague, unknowingly shipped from London on a piece of wet cloth; a soldier driven to suicide after guarding a stretch of a young Berlin Wall.

Headliners I Like Trains

With such loaded imagery and symbolism already existing in the bare bones of reality, it seems impossible for I Like Trains not to create a funereal, haunting live show.

But the band struggle with lyrics, accentuating and repeating the weakest lines and reducing the beautiful melancholia of dead lives into insulting clichés and easy rhymes.

Flat delivery

David Martin's cracked baritone could pierce the instrumental sound, but the slow, flat delivery made it muddy and bored, and actually became a chore to listen to.

The music was lacking, too, so often falling into lines purely created to provoke emotion.

Of course, popular music exists on this method, but the method needs to be added to, expanded and changed rather than repeated to a stereotype.

We know that minor chords are sad and that reverb provides atmosphere, but these are tools to build with rather than foundations.

Songs with the magnitude of grandeur I Like Trains are trying to create cannot be made with only an effects pedal and recycled compositional techniques.

Well received

It would be cruel to finish this review without mentioning that, in general, I Like Trains were very well received by an active and participatory crowd.

Their friendly back-and-forth with the disembodied audience voices was confident and funny, and the general atmosphere betrayed the implied seriousness of their songs.

It is true that, as an idea, I Like Trains have everything going for them – a solid manifesto, genuine belief in their performance, and a group of tight musicians.

And if a band needs a gimmick, matching locomotive-based uniforms and a preoccupation with archived mortality is a malleable marketing tool.

However, their static stage presence and the almost predictable music meant that, for me at least, they are a revolution without a cause.

I Like Trains and Sennen played Norwich Arts Centre on Friday, 5 October, 2007.