While I generally try to give myself credit for second-guessing my actions and tastes, stepping out of the here and now and looking at everything within the context of a greater pattern that in most cases hasn't fully developed yet, there are a number of albums that I manage to get excited about because of the potential that they represent, rather than what they actually are. This means that I go around singing the praises of, say, Material Issue or Ben Lee, equating a few stellar tracks with overall greatness. And while there's nothing wrong with the artists themselves (or, in many cases, the albums, even), my boosterism gets so engrained that I'm eventually just supporting them because I've always supported them, and I inevitably become slowly disappointed because I've essentially lied to myself. Occasionally, the artist will actually call my bluff and raise the stakes but, more often not, I praise these bands much more often than I listen to them.
Travis falls firmly into this category. I think. Of course it's still too early to tell (which is part of the nature of this whole problem), but after a few spins of The Man Who, there are exactly three songs that I can safely state are as great as I want them to be. The opening "Writing To Reach You" is an earnest yearning for connection that's also good-natured enough to contain one of several mild jabs at tourmates Oasis ("what's a wonderwall anyway?"). "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" is a great dour pop song, hinting at a darkness that never comes, which only serves to make it even bleaker. "Turn" is grand drama, anchored by a chorus in which singer Fran Healy lets loose with a full-throated wail that pierces through the orchestral majesty provided by just two guitars, one bass and a drum kit.
And that's it. No alarms and no surprises. Possessed of a very subdued but warm electric sound, Travis is neither as fey as fellow Scots Belle & Sebastian nor as rockist as obvious heroes Radiohead, the T. Rex-ish guitar solo in "As You Are" notwithstanding. They basically hit on one tone -- comfortable melancholy -- and ride it out. Their goal is not to rattle but to soothe, and even when a chorus needs more distortion than the verse, the band provides a very quick and subtle swell, one which seems to say, "This part was quieter and this part was louder and we don't want to make a big deal about the difference."
The first time I heard "Turn," my introduction to the band, I thought I'd finally found the Remy Zero song that could give me some sort of entry into the two albums of theirs that I'd bought and just couldn't penetrate. Wrong band (though the two have been spotted touring together, so draw your own conclusions). But, very possibly, the right opinion. I will be watching to see what possibly great things Travis accomplishes next. But I will be watching my watching them. (MH)
(Sony Music; Travis -- http://www.travisonline.com/)

BUY ME:

Tyro
Audiocards

From humble beginnings, sometimes great things grow. Don't get me wrong: Tyro's Audiocards is the humble beginnings. But it has signs of life that explode all over the place. At turns odd and beautiful, dissonant and soaring, and sometimes all of the above at once, the Atlanta group's debut is spiked with electric jolts that provide surprise and a soul to their electro-punk scientist pop.
I'd guess that's mostly due to Katie Hartley's voice, which in pitch and timbre replicates nothing so much as the sound of her synthesizer, cool, eerie and vaguely robotic. Without her, Audiocards might be nothing more than ear candy. Like Susan Sarandon in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Katie doesn't possess musical-theatre vocal talents; unlike Sarandon, she's not actually in a musical and thus doesn't have to worry about it. Locating the perfect frame for her imperfect instrument, she shines in disparate contexts. The drum freakout of "Lonely" betrays the thinness of her voice by bolstering it with cacophony, while the slow and beautiful "Grey Clouds" is relatively stripped down, a sad, nearly five-minute pop song in 3/4 time that a singer with a more powerful voice would have ruined.
The rest of Tyro, meanwhile, keeps things moving briskly, banging through garage rock of a type (and density) that didn't exist before the advent of computers (although there are times, especially at the end of "Shadow," that guitarist Skipper Hartley reminds me of Mick Ronson, of all people). The songs are occasionally science experiments more than anything else; not only is "Blameless" sung through a walkie-talkie, the entire second verse consists of two Katies communicating across the left and right channels. Later on, the resignation story of "Over the Moon" ("She left without a word...") unfolds over what sounds like, but is most definitely not, a preprogrammed drum beat from a $90 portable keyboard, and the distorted electric guitars of the chorus act not as vocabulary but as punctuation (an ellipsis, if I had to pick which one).
The album closes smartly with its best track, "Remember When We Were Very Young?," an instrumental that seems to update the Tornadoes' "Telstar" by throwing out the crappy bits (which were most of them) and hurtling the remainder headlong into the not-too-distant future. The shifting time signatures, repetitive synth bass and diamond-hard guitar make it interesting; the simple and indelible melody line make it brilliant. Not all of Audiocards is up to that level, but the songs that aren't drift by innocuously enough, so I see no real need to elaborate. If, in the middle of weirdness, perfect little moments spring up, then, well, they're still perfect. Which, frankly, puts them light years ahead of most humble beginners. (MH)
(Mute Records -- 140 West 22nd Street -- Suite 10A, New York, NY. 10011; http://www.mute.com/; Tyro -- http://www.tyro.org/)