Travis in NY:
October 23, 2003
ROCK REVIEW | 'TRAVIS'
Beyond Love, but Coming From the Heart
By JON PARELES
Sooner or later self-absorption has its limits. Travis, a Scottish band that started a two-night stand at the Beacon Theater on Tuesday night, has become one of Britain's most popular bands with songs that magnify lovesick pleas into grand anthems. Most of the time Fran Healy, Travis's songwriter, sang about loneliness and the loves who got away. But on Travis's new album, "12 Memories" (Epic/Independiente), Mr. Healy has started to look beyond private troubles to public affairs, in one more unexpected pop repercussion of the campaign against terrorism and the invasion of Iraq.
"You don't need an invitation to drop in upon a nation," he sang in "The Beautiful Occupation," continuing, "So much for an intervention/Don't call the united nations." But before he sang it, he took pains to tell the audience that the song was personal, not political. "We've always written from our hearts," he said. "We've always just written about things that, you know, you just feel compelled to express."
Such unabashed earnestness makes Travis stand out in a pop sphere full of image mongering and mixed messages. The band is almost defensive about professing sincerity; its posture is that it has no pose. And as its audiences have grown, the challenge has been to make modesty ring out on an ever larger scale.
To do that Travis uses reliable models. The songs have the old-fashioned gift of melody, and the band is steeped in 1960's rock, mining the Beatles above all for harmonies, arrangements and a music-hall bounce. But it also draws on U2 for tolling guitars and huge vocal crescendos. The songs built to inexorable peaks as Mr. Healy sang plaints like the one in "Re-Offender": "You say you love me, and then you do it again." But the music didn't linger at its crests. It tapered off as if any sustained outburst was unseemly.
The songs were waltzes, Merseybeat bounces and grand ballads, with melodies that rose to Mr. Healy's vulnerable falsetto. Near the end Travis played an early song, "All I Wanna Do Is Rock," a slow stomp that gave Andy Dunlop a chance to climb onto his amplifier and swing his guitar for feedback. But he climbed down so the song could end quietly.
More than it wants to rock, Travis wants to bemoan troubles, offer consolation and now and then consider the state of the world.
