Travis: The Invisible Band : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

This year's most promising Brit-pop confrontation pits Radiohead against their shiny-faced doppelganger, Travis. What's in the arsenal of The Invisible Band (which arrives a week after Radiohead's new Amnesiac)? Just the age-old charms of folkie strums, orchestral swells and a little banjo. Anything more - say, a difficult guitarless record - would be too conspicuous for a band so egoless it'd just as soon become invisible. Travis are opting out of U.K. pop's celebrity death match to focus attention on the songs, man.

Lacking any dramatic innovations or departures from last year's The Man Who, The Invisible Band succeeds by approximating - via warm melodies, textures and sincerity - Simon and Garfunkel fronting U2. No longer as concerned with where the rain falls, frontman Fran Healy submits the rousing "Sing" and sunny "Flowers in the Window" for proof he's grown up and fallen in love; both songs, unlike most of the other tracks on Invisible Band, are as catchy as anything on The Man Who. Elsewhere, Healy's unrelenting earnestness gets raised to new heights by his newfound confidence. His lesson-songs - including "Side" (we're all on the same team) and "The Cage" (if you love someone, set them free) - revive a near-dead tradition: the songwriter who thinks he's got something to teach us. The effort, if not entirely successful, is sympathetically disarming.

RONI SARIG
(RS 871 - June 21, 2001)