Customer Reviews

Ode To J. Smith

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I`m loving this album, the same authentic and unpretentious style from Travis which is something fans really dig.

The album is very easy to listen too. Yes the kind of album where you don`t need the skip button. You won`t see anything new here, just some great tunes to carry around with you in your ipod or in your next roadtrip.

My favorite songs are:

Quite free
Song to Self
Before you were young

My favorite album by is still the Invisible Band. Twelve Memories had a few good songs but felt too angsty to be Travis. Ode to Joe Smith takes some of the rawness of 12 Memories and turns it up a notch. The music itself is simplistic and memorable but catchy and memorable. If you're guitarist, you'll have fun dancing around their melodies. If you love Travis and raw brit pop pub crawlin' rock then you will not regret purchasing this release.

I was very surprised to see Travis releasing a new album so soon after 2007's "The Boy With No Name", especially since that album took four years to come out after 2003's "12 Memories".

So I knew I was in for either a rushed, terrible mistake, or something great. Luckily, this album is something really special.

After sort of a departure into very "poppy" music, they've found their roots and rocked out. It reminds me of their first album, 1997's "Good Feeling" in the sense that it's a bit harder than everything released after, but with a much more mature style to it.

I really enjoyed the opening track, "Chinese Blues", but was completely sold on the very dynamic, yet short, "J. Smith" which goes into a bold Gregorian chant mid-song that just blows me away.

If you lost a bit of interest in Travis from "The Boy With No Name", this should revive your faith in the band. The album is smart, fun, hard, soft, original, accessible, and eclectic. Front-man, Fran Healy reminds us, as he said on their debut album, "All I Wanna Do Is Rock".

It is doubtful that Travis will be able to replicate the top to bottom quality of the Man Who again. That said, this album is closer to their first two albums than to the more recent.
Some tracks are keepers like Something Anything, J. Smith, and but some are forgettable like Before You Were Young and Broken Mirrors. The rest are somewhere in between. Long Way Down could have been on Good Feeling, Get Up could have been on 12 Memories, Last Words on Invisible Band, and Friends sounds like some of their B-sides.
All in all the album does grow on you after a few lessons, but it will not be remembered as one of their best...

Travis' latest album comes a little more than a year after "The Boy With No Name" and was recorded in record time, supposedly to capture a bit of creative mojo and get them back to their electric based rock. It speaks volumes about the band's talent that this album is an entertaining listen with no bad songs and yet it is easily their weakest effort to date. While every song has a decent melody, only the last track, Before You Were Young, stays with you after you've finished listening to it. Let's face it, the songwriting on this album is just plain lazy. Fran Healy is capable of so much better than what he delivers here. The fact that this album still entertains despite the fact that the band seem bored most of the way through is astonishing. Some advice for Travis: take a bit of a hiatus and come back when you have recharged your creative batteries. Live up to your expectations.

I have picked up every travis album from the beginning, and while some of their CDs are high quality back to front (The man who), all of them have had at least a few gems to add to your itunes (Boy with no name, 12 memories). I'm sorry to say that this is completely forgettable, if not grating to listen to. Songs range from a little bitty voice singing about being forlorn in monotonous fashion, to supposedly "hard songs". I strain to find a chord progression with any complexity, a good lyric, or really anything worthwhile. Quit trying to be something else. If you want my copy, I left it in a rest stop around Tomah, Wisconsin.