Leeds five-piece iLiKETRAiNS are keen to shake off their
morose image.
Apparently, the boys who made
2007 debut album Elegies To Lessons Learnt - a lighthearted look at how humanity consistently fails to learn from its mistakes - are actually
quite fond of a party.
"I think people think we're miserable in real life because of our music, but we're quite happy guys,"says drummer Simon Fogal, struggling, aptly enough, with a massive hangover from the
previous night's excess. "We like
a joke and we like a drink. We just
happen to write quite sombre music."
The band are currently on their third European tour, this time to promote
We Go Hunting, the latest single from Elegies, and the full-length animated film they made based on the album.
Treading the same grim path
as songs such as The Deception, about an ill-fated yachtsman, and Terra Nova, a grim look at Captain Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition, We Go Hunting was inspired by the chaos and hysteria of the 17th-century Salem witch
trials. A live favourite, it is a short, sharp, brutal song, with lyrics such as
"If the demons divide, the demons
will conquer/If you give them
an inch, they'll take a mile".
In music - a field dominated
by pursuit of the new - iLiKETRAiNS are unusual in their fixation on the past. The Times dubbed their
majestic, melancholy sound "library rock." ("We all laughed when we read that," says Fogal. "But I suppose it's quite apt.") While The Guardian described it as music "less to be
listened to and more to be visited,
like a museum or war memorial".
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"We started off writing about one
of the first people to die on the British
railways and became fascinated with these morbid characters," Fogal explains. "From there, we ended up with a bit of a concept album."
The animated film that accompanies Elegies is similarly bleak, following
a bewildered soul as he travels
through the series of historical events depicted on the album.
"A lot of Goths come to see us," Fogal comments, with inexplicable
surprise. "They love us in Whitby."
Still, he continues to insist things are looking sunnier for the band these days, adding: "When we start on our second album, we're going to take
a different route to usual. You can only look to the past for so long, until you have to start looking forward."
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