Review: Mortal Morning - The Lost Line

The other release that comes to mind here is Chris Watson’s El Tren Fantasma, which documents the journey of the Mexican “Ghost Train” from Los Mochis to Veracruz; an album that unfolds from the expectation set by its cover image, with galloping metal and jets of steam carving up a landscape of dry, balding earth. The Lost Line presents a very different evocation of its subject: the train as an independent being of steel and myth, looming as a silhouette in plain sight and a mesh of hidden voices and disturbing narratives stowed in its furnace; not a vessel of transit but a beast of its own grim intentions, gliding toward a destination that lays far beyond the end of the line.

I hear only fragments of the familiar – rhythms that resemble the endless clack over the tracks, hideous siren songs of brakes screaming into the rails – but these are slotted into a frame of industrial apocalypse lurch, clouds of rusted friction and brass band infernos. Steam comes in hard, steady bursts like a mechanical bull, while the body of whirrs and low frequency groans is bent into everything from volcanic orchestra crescendo to bright, bouncy hops of jazz; I feel the train as an essence, a gas perhaps; as a taste of flaked paint and metal, of transitory ritual and shadows gliding across a floodlit winter night. Gardiner treats the train as a molecular substance, crafting new objects from within which the engine speaks in strange, semi-coherent tongue.