1) Quicksand; 2) The Beautiful Occupation; 3) Re-Offender; 4) Peace the Fuck Out; 5) How Many Hearts; 6) Paperclips; 7) Somewhere Else; 8) Love Will Come Through; 9) Mid-Life Krysis; 10) Happy to Hang Around; 11) Walking Down the Hill; 12) Some Sad Song [hidden track]
Happy-go-lucky troubadours run out of luck, get less happy. The most inwards-looking Travis ever got, and they got my full attention at last.
Key tracks: "Quicksand", "Love Will Come Through", "Mid-Life Krysis"
Travis - the harmlessly inconspicuous, squeaky clean, la-de-da sing-along guys mostly known for earworm fluff like “Why Does It Always Rain on Me” - aren’t the sort of act you’d ever expect to be moody, but the borderline self-consciously dour, gray-tone cover of 12 Memories speaks for itself. This should have been a victory lap for Travis, given the worldwide success of the preceding album The Invisible Band, but then everything hit. The post-9/11 years were a mess of global anxiety, the UK was dragged into a war no one wanted to partake in and on a more personal level, Travis themselves almost reached their end when drummer Neil Primrose nearly died in an accident, suffering significant injuries instead. 12 Memories was born out of a tumultuous period where things started getting a little too heavy to handle and no one really wanted to make another upbeat pop album. Instead, the sessions started producing catchy tunes about civilian war casualties, violence and general downbeat introspection.
Travis can’t escape themselves - there’s still plenty of hummable melodies and catchy choruses - but they couldn’t be any different from their usual selves. It’s most clearly audible in the album’s tone, dominated by a constant sense melancholy and frequent moments of quietly bubbling frustration breaking through. When the results are more familiarly Travis-like, there’s still a twist there: “Quicksand” and “Somewhere Else” are punctuated by their pessimism and ache respectively, “Re-Offender” could have probably slotted neatly within the past albums if it wasn’t for its depiction of domestic abuse and “Love Will Come Through” is a Travis love song as sung by someone who knows they’re lying through their teeth just to keep a semblance of hope around. “Paperclips” - a simple acoustic-based song - is a bleak dark night of the soul and completely devoid of any light, and it’s actually effective. It also makes it clear that Fran Healy’s voice can in fact be a very effective thing - his soft-spokenly frail tone finds its natural habitat in a moodier context.
But while 12 Memories is largely characterised by its mood, what makes it at times downright exciting is the band’s decision to move somewhere different sonically while they’re at it hacking away their past reputation: it is - by Travis’ standards - an adventurous album. Who would have thought you’d hear something as abruptly violent as the guitar breaks on “How Many Hearts” on a Travis album? Later on “Mid-Life Krysis” backs its verses with a constant drone that gives it an unsettling tension, “Happy to Hang Around” is freezing cold much thanks to its sharply mixed drums and other sudden production tweaks that make it sound ever so disjointed, and at the very end the band move their instruments to the background and layer the restlessly dreamy “Walking Down the Hill” with a near-electronic soundscape that takes it into a world of its own. Travis explore new sounds and elements throughout the album’s length and not only does it keep the listener on his toes, but through doing so they manage to beat away one of my personal complaints of Travis’ catalogue, i.e. that they’ve rarely offered anything new to the table.
So when a band who is perfectly able to knockout a dang good tune but suffers from frequent stagnation ends up making an album where they very decidedly avoid repeating themselves, you get to the juicy center part of the Venn diagram. Besides a couple of slightly lesser tunes (”Peace the Fuck Out” wastes a great bridge to an otherwise passable ditty where the most embarrassingly memorable thing is the awkward swearing, and “How Many Hearts” only ever comes alive when the guitar walls come crashing), 12 Memories combines Travis’ best melodic elements with really neat arrangements and a tangible emotional weight that does its own great job carrying the album. It’s especially apparent after the halfway point, because starting from “Somewhere Else” the album really transforms from a nice excursion to actually great. “Love Will Come Through” and “Mid-Life Krysis” are the album’s absolute highlights, “Walking Down the Hill” never stops being mesmerising in its passive brooding and even the hidden track “Some Sad Song” is a secret success - its solo piano melancholy is a perfect full stop at the end of the tracklist. The awkward notion that a serious tone indicates good music is obviously hanging about, but whether it was because the context drove the band this way or they were heading towards a change anyway after reaching one apex point, it’s undeniable how inspired 12 Memories sounds at its best. If Travis’ main issue always was how intangible they could be with their happy-go-lucky dittiness (to the point that titling one of their albums The Invisible Band is almost ironic) then here’s both the emotional resonance and the consistently good songs that break through that.
This seems to be the album that tends to get brushed off when Travis fans discuss the band, but for the same reasons it’s the record that those who’ve never been that bothered by the Scottish quartet might find worth their time. What 13 was to Blur, this is to Travis.
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