Tom Wells writes the songs; Fast Trains is the vehicle. The Portsmouth outfit operates in alternative territory with an unmistakably English lineage, and the comparisons that follow them around, XTC, Radiohead, Elbow, are flattering without being ridiculous. Wells has taken songwriting prizes internationally, the band has opened tours around the country and worked festival stages, and radio has stayed loyal, from BBC 6 Music through Amazing Radio, BBC Introducing and BBC Radio Solent.
Their debut, “Escape to ourWorld,” runs ten tracks and refuses to change the subject. Each song hands the idea of getting away to a different narrator: one is trying to outrun time, another is running from anxiety, another simply wants to be somewhere geographically else. Wells wrote and produced all of it, and the record took shape across a fortnight’s residency in a house once occupied by the composer Imogen Holst.
Holly Takes Me Home Again
Of those ten, this is the one that goes somewhere the rest don’t. Everywhere else on the album imagines an exit you could actually take. Here the escape being contemplated is from living altogether, which puts the track in far heavier territory than anything sitting next to it.
It’s the closest thing on the record to a ballad, opening with piano out front and not much else keeping it company, and a lesser writer would have been content to leave it there. Wells isn’t. Stretches of real warmth keep getting interrupted by passages that scatter into something looser and considerably stranger, a jazz inflection creeping in around the edges before the song pulls itself back together.
That instability reads as a decision rather than an accident. A song about wanting out of everything has no business tying itself off neatly, and an arrangement that keeps coming apart and re-forming does more work than a straight lament ever could. Wells layers the production densely enough that new details surface on later plays, which is true of the album generally but matters most here, where every shift in mood is carrying narrative weight.
Final Thoughts
“Holly Takes Me Home Again” is the point where “Escape to ourWorld” stops being playful about its own premise, and the charm packed around it only sharpens the contrast. Fast Trains made an album worth disappearing into, and this is the track that justifies the whole conceit.
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