Travis: The Men Who… bring out the bitter bastard in everyone, actually, what with the songs about driftwood, and the flowers in the window, and the whole sing, sing, sing business. Bastards. Like it or not though, Travis have a gift for melody that is – no, stop shaking your head – near-unparalleled in pop songwriting over the last ten years. Anyone who says they don’t find themselves mentally following Fran Healy’s skylark of a voice as it drifts and glides along those nagging, vaulting melodies like a kite on a gust of wind, frankly, simply hasn’t the bottle to be honest about it.
12 Memories, their fourth album, is an unexpectedly darker prospect: those sing, sing, singing melodies are now full of painfully lost innocence, helpless anger and melancholy. It suits them, mostly. Darkly brilliant first single ‘Re-Offender’, the album’s standout track and one of their finest, explores abusive, violent love; elsewhere, the Twin Towers loom large (“Bad news/Comes in twos”), as does drummer Neil Primrose’s near-fatal accident (the album is dedicated to a ‘Dr. Giacomelli’), as does – and we didn’t see this coming - the Bush/Blair war (‘Beautiful Occupation’, ‘Peace The Fuck Out’). Ironically, in fact, seeing as that they’ve just stopped working with Nigel “Radiohead” Godrich (producer of The Man Who and The Invisible Band), Travis have never sounded more like the serious, sweet-natured, less artsy younger brothers of The Oxford Five.
As a collection, it’s not quite a masterpiece, but it’s lovely, and not a little brave, either. Go on and like ’em if you think you’re hard enough.