The Leaving Trains
Favorite Mood Swings (SST)
by Jon Sarre
Although I’ve never had much use for these so-glam-they’re-ugly L.A. trannies, The Leaving Trains (and especially lead, uh, person, Falling James) have been standin’ up and deliverin’ their garaged-out punk since the Reagan Administration, so if nothin’ else, this collection of “hits” is sure more convenient than leafin’ through their myriad albums (most of which can be picked up used at a reasonable discount). Okay, that was unfair, cuz the Leaving Trains are (were? They released a split single with Cobra Verde on Get Hip! last year) a pretty good band.
Unappreciated and unknown, perhaps, but they create usually short, sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant (occasionally both in the same song) rock’n’roll which veers from driving punk (like “27 Days”) to drunken country blues (take “So Fucked Up”) to proto-alternaschlock (“Dude the Cat,” I suppose) to foul-mouthed troggatude (“I Love You”) to genre-defying deformities (“What Cissy Said”‘s Velvet Undergroundish “Stephanie/ Candy Says” bubblegum beef-jerker like what Lou Reed probably woulda kept doin’ for Pickwick if he hadn’t met John Cale). The band’s probably not-too willful obscurity maybe stems from the fact that they are too difficult to pin down (and thus, to be marketed to various tastemaker sub-genres).
“I don’t want your m-m-m-money/I just want you to look me in the eye,” Falling James offers us on “Black,” suggesting that we’re missing the point. That would be (besides respect), I dunno, sleep? He calls out “Don’t wake me until 1986” on “Temporal Slut”; then there’s “Dream Until You’re Sore” and “Sue Wants to Sleep,” as well as a reference to bein’ “too tired to go home” on “Cigarette Motel.” The slide guitarist on “With Dr. AWOL” sounds like he’s on the nod, or close to it and “Relapse, Recover” is 6:32 of medicinal, daydreamed trance-rock. Will the Leaving Trains’ music be dissected in college lit classes across the nation in twenty years? Will SST Publishing issue “Cliff Notes” of Favorite Mood Swings for “student/athletes”? Should I have another cup of coffee? Probably not.
(PO Box 1 Lawndale, CA 90260)
