About twenty years ago, Scottish band Travis were briefly, and strangely, probably the biggest band in Britain. Between Radiohead and The Verve's gloomy peaks and the advent of Coldplay they had their moment in the sun.
The band were recipients of no little flak for their inofensiveness and blandless but I always rather liked them. They wrote warm, understated and heartfelt songs, played them without pretension and always had a thing with melody. Their peak was with 1999's The Man Who, and it was a record I liked and played a lot at the time.
They've soldiered on since, putting out a record every few years, never deviating much at all from their initial template. There seems to be an 'if it's not broken, don't fix it' approach. Much closer to the R.E.M. school of things than the Oasis or Primal Scream one. Like Teenage Fanclub they're more redolent of cocoa and slippers than Jack Daniels.
Occasionally, on latest record 10 Songs, (how prosaic is that), they rock out, at least to the degree that Travis have ever allowed themselves to rock out. For the most part they're as laid back as reflective as they were on Driftwood, Writing to Reach You and Why Does it Always Rain on Me. Might not be terribly exciting to some but it does the trick for me.
Perhaps I'm damning them with faint praise by Travis are a solid band and they write pleasant songs and make highly polished and competent records. They're devoid of pretension and flash and conduct themselves with greater dignity than many of their contemporaries. This may not be the stuff of Rock and Roll lore but perhaps The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and The Who said almost everything that needed to be said about that almost fifty years back.
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