33 rebellions per minute
"Scraping me off the ceiling, back to that good feeling"
1997
Travis, GOOD FEELING
Having acknowledged a couple of weeks ago, in my review of Jennifer Kimball's debut, that I own far too many good 25-cent promo albums that I don't listen to, I felt a certain obligation to go listen to them before I bought anything more (loosely defining "them" as "well, a few of them at least", and "anything more" as "not counting the three used cassettes and the Mecca Normal LP I picked up shortly after because I, like, totally forgot"). GOOD FEELING immediately stands out a clear indicator that I was right to do this. On first impression, it seemed vaguely nice enough, like Suede attempting to be Kiss but having too much self-respect to do it properly: melodramatic but streamlined glam-rock with dumb lyrics sung in a really cool British accent. Which describes "U16 Girls" precisely, right down to a "Na, na nana nana, na" that should be sung at basketball games and the lyrics, cautionary to a rather specific lifestyle, about "be sure that she's old enough before you lose your mind"; I can't imagine why that seemed minor enough to ignore, but perhaps I need to practice rephrasing "catchy but dumb" as "dumb but _catchy_" in order to remind myself which qualification really counts. "The Line Is Fine" seems to find its virtue in equal unsophistication, and indeed would if Travis didn't keep changing from one classic four-chord pattern to another, to another, to another. "I Just Wanna Rock", the leadoff track, sounds less Suede than Spinal Tap, especially as it tries with obvious desperation to find lovelorn rhymes for the title ("I'm just like a foot without a sock, without you/ You seem to work around the clock").
But first of all, even on a lyric level, the Kiss comparison doesn't work; by the time you've gotten through more songs of "Your head is a brickwall, my heart is a football, your eyes broken windows" and "scraping me off the ceiling/ back into that good feeling", it's hard not to notice that the freefalling melodic rapture of "Do it to me! Do it to me! Do it to me!" (in the non-Shakespearean "Midsummer Night's Dreaming") is paired with repetitions of "I've had too much to drink" and relationship complaints and an eventual buildup into screeching clamor and a voice-shredding "Tooo muuch!! Tooooo muuuuuuuch! Tooooooooo muuuuuuch!". "Tied To The Nineties", behind its Mott The Hoople piano strut and macho calls of "Hey!", rhymes its title with "I'm terribly frightened" but adds the thoughtfully unnostalgiac "Remember the eighties? They were worse than the nineties". After that, the music itself starts to reflect the emotional downturn. I'm not saying this is _better_ than Kiss's frat-party swagger, but it's different. And the singer's voice, which ought to be (perhaps is) paired with irresistable puppy-dog eyes, radiates sincerity.
The fifth song, "Good Feeling", is where the simple musical equation starts to fall apart, as the wildly distorted drums suggest Siouxsie and the Banshee's weirdest song "Peek-A-Boo" and the piano part breaks into an appealingly inept Scott Joplin-style solo. After "Tied...", "I Love You Anyways" sounds like it ought to be a mournful country waltz, though in fact it's not a waltz and it keeps its pace with snare rolls and an oscillating organ part. "Happy" has a Byrdsy jangle straight from "Feel A Whole Lot Better", and constant cymbal smashes filling the spectrum, but uses a deeply weird chord (one key's major third leads to a different key's augmented fourth, I think) to effect an odd early-Beatle what-was-THAT key change. "More Than Us" is lullabyish in its ringing acoustic guitar and its soft vocal harmonies, and its melody suggests the early Beatles if their Everly Brothers influence included the country crooning. "Falling Down" _is_ a waltz, with pedal steel guitar, xylophone, low piano notes, and an edge-of-tears delivery that sounds just like Bono. Then the final song, "Funny Thing", joins its simple angry acoustic-strum ballad structure with a soft buildup of outright weird sounds: a rhino yawning in a wind tunnel, a small upscaling melody played by rapid morse code, a 140-pin bowling strike in B minor, sleigh bells being stomped by a foreman whose steel boots register a 2 on the Richter scale.
None of which means I was wrong about this being, basically, a catchy pop album, indeed one which suggests Suede's vocal and melodramatic presence. It's simply catchy-but-intelligent, and that's even better.
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