Fran Healy
calls
L.A. Times
, the tenth studio album from
Travis
, the group's "most personal album since
The Man Who
," the 1999 record that found the Scottish guitar band establishing the parameters of their thoughtful indie rock.
Healy
's comparison hinges upon emotion, not music.
aren't attempting to revive the hunger and ambition that fueled them as young men, they're testing the creative boundaries of middle age as they take stock of the state of a world in tumult.
wrote the songs for
at the studio he has on the outskirts of Los Angeles' Skid Row, then the band turned to producer
Tony Hoffer
-- a frequent collaborator with one of L.A.'s bards,
Beck
-- to polish the tunes into an album that embraces the unknown and finds comfort in the familiar.
Hoffer
helps steer
toward production that feels modern, expanding the band's aural palette without abandoning their identity. When things get stripped back to not much more than a guitar and voice -- as it is on "Live It All Again" -- the group's art-rock lineage comes into focus, just like how the jaunty bounce of "Gaslight" suggests buried ties to Britpop. The remarkable thing about
, though, is that the album as a whole feels quintessentially American, and Southern Californian at that: it's a vibrant and lively intersection of styles and ideas, all heard through the prism of an expatriate who remains enamored and bewildered by his new home. Dig beneath the surface, and the lyrics make plain
's claim of the album being a personal record, but the trick that
pull off with
is that it is engaging on the surface thanks to colorful melodies and shifting arrangements -- the very things that beg for subsequent listens, the ones where themes reveal themselves. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine