Rather in the same way that it’s hard to explain the genius of the TV series Breaking Bad to someone who has never seen it (“It’s about this dying chemistry teacher who sells crystal meth…”), Big Big Train’s approach to music is tough to articulate to the uninitiated. With their superficial Genesis feel set to pining, wistful tales of steam trains, they’re a band who continue to progress with every release, as their uniquely branded, mid-20th century prog gathers an unstoppable momentum.
Released last year, their seventh full-length release, English Electric Part One, was a defining moment, and the dexterity shown on such tracks as The First Rebreather and Judas Unrepentant ensured that it was rated as one of the albums of the year.
Although recorded during the same sessions, there was a tangible concern that Part Two might fail to equal the high benchmark set by its predecessor. Fortunately, this companion verifies the theory that Big Big Train are a band for whom eloquent inspiration and a prolific brilliance comes naturally.
Part Two’s sentimental theme certainly isn’t something new to the band – their first album was, after all, entitled Goodbye To The Age Of Steam – and it’s been at the core of their unique, nostalgia-infused music ever since. Indeed, they’re so proficient at lyrically conveying that feeling of the demise of a golden era that, even if you weren’t born in those times, they still manage to generate a feeling of soulful longing in the listener. It’s Boy’s Own stuff, complete with mental images of coal fires, the wonders of engineering and the multi-dimensional characters that populate the tales.
Take, for example, the opener East Coast Rider, a 15-minute track that delves into the history behind the 1930s train, Mallard. It’s a topic that certainly won’t enthral every listener, but the lush orchestrations and multiplicity of textures that have been beautifully layered throughout the song undoubtedly will. Cleverly constructed and free of the kind of meandering, musical flabbiness that can sometimes infiltrate prog tracks of this magnitude, it sets the tone for the remainder of the album.
The sizeable elephant in the room is the similarity of David Longdon’s vocals to Peter Gabriel’s – something that anyone hearing the band for the first time will revel in pointing out. Yet this is clearly something natural and it must be a constant frustration for Longdon that the comparison repeatedly crops up. After all, how many singers are there within the metal genre who sound like Robert Plant? Musically there are similarities too, but these aren’t in the way that certain bands in the early 80s just tried to be imitators. Genesis are merely one of several influences that have helped shape the band’s sound, and with the musicians behind Big Big Train all being of a similarly high calibre, they’ve evolved into something truly distinctive.
English Electric Part Two is an album that possesses a precise balance between upbeat moments of swagger and mellower, almost mournful segments, which ensures that everything flows impeccably.
A perfect example of the latter is the inspired Swan Hunter. Complete with an utterly mesmerising brass section, and lyrics dealing with the decline of a North East shipping yard and the bond between father and son, it’s thematically reminiscent of the sentiments expressed on Sting’s album The Soul Cages. With that subject matter, this could be a potentially depressing tale, but with the band’s skilful delivery, it’s actually unexpectedly uplifting.
Elsewhere, Leopards and Worked Out are affectionate ballads, while Keeper Of Abbeys is a track of such intense splendour – replete with painstakingly created interwoven melodies – that the magnitude of what Big Big Train have again managed to produce is tricky to fully grasp.
For a band who have now been in existence for over 20 years to be creating albums as perfect as this is in itself utterly remarkable. The fact that this is their second release of such a calibre within the space of a year can only reinforce the opinion that what we’re dealing with here is an act of rare, often indescribable brilliance.
