Progress:Reform (revisited)...

This is for whoever just asked about the lyrics for 'Progress:Reform'. I was thinking about this today, if only by proxy. Is Royal Mail about to self destruct in a similar way?
It is quite possible and I have mentioned my concern before - look at the effect the miners' strike of 1983-4 had. Yes, it was an industry facing major issues of falling demand, over-staffing and tragically adversarial industrial relations but that is relevant. Royal Mail, I fear, is now staring into the same abyss and the result could be as damaging as that which harks back to the Railway industry of 1963, which is where this track (as yet incomplete in lyric as I have to do them line-by-line) comes from...

The Beeching Report

Is this the price we pay for progress?
Taking one step forwards
For every six we take back.
Does your dirty oil-stained money
Make you happy?

Do you just want to be remembered?
To book your place in history?
[You will be!] {whispered choir}
Reform, reform!

You are taking apart what we made
With our hands and and our hearts
Our hands and our hearts
Are not just tools to ply your trade.

They are ours to live our lives
And you are taking them away.
Feel free to wrap you hands around our necks
And I'll feel free to do the same.

That's not all of it and probably due to its length they didn't play it at Latitude 2009, more is the pity, but at least this is a start on the lyric. It is a remarkable piece of writing from a remarkable band.

Elegies To Lessons Learnt

I have mentioned this band before and this is one album that I have been looking forward to for a very long time. It is the first true album from iLiKETRAiNS and if you have heard the Progress:Reform EP then you would expect little else. While none of the tracks from that EP are repeated here the more recent single Spencer Percival does feature.
The album mainly addresses historical topics and this kind of music is quite surely not to everyone's taste but if you like it then you might well like this album a great deal. The label Beggars Banquet has also made it available on a suitably historical format too and the 12" LP edition is particularly worthwhile owning if just for the the artwork and the excellent quality of its packaging.

The cover artwork 'Tree of Eyam' was also created by the band. It is like the subject matter of many of the songs and is rather on the dark side. Reviewing the album is not as easy as I thought it would be and I think it is a "Marmite experience". Music-as-a-history-lesson is almost certainly either passion or poison!
I fall in the former category, and there is no doubt about that, but I'll try and provide some more objective commentary on individual tracks from the album no later than this coming weekend. In the mean time I'll end with one of my own images because, while the sun doesn't always shine, I like trains too.

This is Minehead shed, Somerset, at work on a misty morning in March 2006.

Think about this while listening to the to The Beeching Report, which is the final track on the Progress:Reform EP. While this route just survived the mass cull in the 1960s, and has eventually become a major tourist attraction, the great majority didn't.