Album review: Travis - Where You Stand

Travis frontman Fran Healy. Picture: Getty

TRAVIS: WHERE YOU STAND

Red Telephone Box, £13.99

Star rating: * *

Or at least that’s what one is tempted to assume when faced with the omnipresence of Coldplay, Mumford & Sons or whoever else functions as the latest musical anaesthetic.

There was a time when Travis were the go-to band for the insipid pick-me-up – their signature hit Why Does It Always Rain On Me? being the optimum example, though far from the best song in their catalogue. But pop music being what it is, things move on and there is always another such outfit ready to take over that non-taxing role of dispensing musical opiates to the masses.

Returning to this unfraught fray after a hiatus of five years, Travis have cited the need to regain their creative hunger but they fail to demonstrate any such primal urge with their latest album. Where You Stand (even the title smacks of artistic fatigue) features a bunch of songs – 11, according to the sleeve – but as these individual entities rarely fluctuate from mid-paced drift, they eventually bleed into one enervating whole. As a mood piece, it is certainly consistent, but far from stimulating.

This is no great problem in itself. Travis generally operate by stealth – a decade on and I still can’t get the deceptively simple Sing out of my head. There’s no wham-bam about their songwriting and if you are already a fan, you may simply slip back into an undemanding appreciation of their easy listening style. But this time around there are none of those insidious earworms with which they have won over floating voters in the past.

Opening track Mother is about as peppy as it gets with its vigorous, rolling piano and some conversational inflections from frontman Fran Healy, left, who can still moan as artfully and emptily as any mildly angsty vocalist. From here, they dovetail straight into the chugging Moving before switching to cruise control, the whistling hook of Reminder being about the last feature of note before this album gives up the ghost and accepts its fate as aural wallpaper.

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WHITE LIES: BIG TV

FICTION, £14.99

Star rating: * *

The arena-friendly indie power trio for those who find Muse a bit scary return with a third album of tastefully gothic brooding which is simply alright if you like that sort of thing. White Lies make like a British Killers with their beefy rhythms, epic synths and Harry McVeigh’s booming voice but, like so many of their peers, their songwriting foundations are shaky. On this occasion, they have dreamed up

a loose narrative following a young girl’s expedition to the big city and

the repercussions for her relationship back home, which fails to transcend the streamlined blandness of the music. FS

THRIFTSTORE MASTERPIECE: TROUBLE IS A LONESOME TOWN

SIDEONEDUMMY RECORDS, £13.99

Star rating; * * * *

Lee Hazlewood has long inspired a cult following but producer/musician Charles Normal has embarked on a real labour of love here, covering Hazlewood’s 1963 debut album – which he bought in a Norwegian charity shop – in its droll entirety, with the help of his late brother Larry, Dandy Warhols frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor, Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse and others. Frank Black is all over this kind of surf/mariachi business anyway, but Art Brut’s Eddie Argos is precisely the kind of eccentric fit of which Hazlewood would surely have approved. The first in a possible series “paying homage to the underdog records of years past”, Trouble Is... is too good for the bargain bin. FS

CLASSICAL

WILLIAM SWEENEY: TREE O’ LICHT

DELPHIAN, £14.99

Star rating: * * * *

It’s the title track – The Tree o’Licht – that clinches it for me. Among a diverse trilogy of works centring on the cello, in which Glasgow composer William Sweeney explores variously its compatibility with electronics, piano and even itself, it is this golden cello duo – an exquisite evocation of Gaelic psalmodic style set in classical guise – that epitomises Sweeney at his most inspired. Robert Irvine and Erkki Lahesmaa are the cellists, the former going it alone within the ethereal electronic soundscape of The Poet Tells of his Fame, and with pianist Fali Pavri in the full-bodied expressiveness of the Sonata for Cello and Piano. KEN WALTON

JAZZ

MIKE GIBBS + 12: PLAY GIL EVANS

WHIRLWIND RECORDINGS, £13.99

Star rating: * * * *

A new album from Mike Gibbs is always a notable occasion, and all the more so for being an infrequent pleasure. This project, originally devised with pianist Hans Koller, marked the centenary celebrations for composer and arranger Gil Evans last year, and features Gibbs conducting an excellent group of largely London-based musicians in a set which mixes classic Evans material with Gibbs’s own equally distinctive take on composing and arranging. Evans opened many new doors in large ensemble jazz with his daring use of colour and musical texture, subtly and imaginatively recreated here, while Gibbs’s take on more contemporary material, including Carla Bley’s Ida Lupino and Ornette Coleman’s Ramblin’, emphasise the importance of his own contribution to the genre. Don’t expect conventional swinging big band choruses, but this is a richly textured recording that will repay repeated exploration.

KENNY MATHIESON

FOLK

RANT: RANT

MAKE BELIEVE RECORDS, £13.99

Star rating: * * * *

There’s nothing belligerent about this particular Rant, although it can be forceful when required. A quartet of established Scots fiddlers – Lauren MacColl, Sarah-Jane Summers and Jenna and Bethany Reid – have dispensed with any accompaniment to fully explore the dynamic and harmonic possibilities of their instruments.

This debut album proves an impressive showcase, right from the deliberate measure of the opening track, One For Us, tersely declared over strummed fiddle strings before the layers build up and they launch into a full and distinctly Shetland-sounding flow. Elsewhere, they delve into 18th century repertoire, striding in purposeful unison in Niel Gow’s Miss Ferguson of Raith before the traditional Miss Mary MacDonald’s Reel emerges compellingly out of murmuring strings, while a brisk Highland strathspey advances in good order into a nimble Shetland reel.

In contrast are a lingering pipe air which leads into some effective call-and-response playing, and East Church, MacColl’s hymn-like tribute to the ancient building in Cromarty amid whose fine acoustic they recorded the album.

JIM GILCHRIST

WORLD

NATACHA ATLAS: HABIBI – CLASSICS AND COLLAB- ORATIONS

NESCENTE, £9.99

Star rating: * * * *

Last week I praised a lovely collection of Fifties music-hall recordings from Algeria entitled Habibi (“my darling”). Coincidentally, this week sees the release of another CD with this title, but it couldn’t be more different. Brussels-born Natacha Atlas – whose father came from North Africa – has now put out a 2CD compilation of her most popular tracks, covering a wide range of collaborations with artists as diverse as Yasmin Levy and Andrew Cronshaw, the protean Nitin Sawhney and the classical composer Jocelyn Pook.

As she rightly says, her music has always reflected a dialogue between East and West.

MICHAEL CHURCH