Travis

“A million lonely people with their heads in the sand / Trying to make some sense of what they don’t understand / Waiting on somebody just to give them a hand.” Within just a few lines on the opening track, the central vision of Travis’s new record, “Ode to J. Smith,” is made painfully clear: man is alone, confused, and just desperate for a little help from his friends.

And in the beautifully (but bleakly) rendered world that Travis crafts, he will wait and wait and wait.

In the words of lead singer Fran Healy, “Ode to J. Smith” is fashioned as a “dark fairy tale.” Wholeheartedly embracing a paradoxically deeply humanistic and pessimistic ethos, the record narrates the day of its eponymous protagonist’s failed suicide attempt.

Each track represents a different moment in J. Smith’s day. Travis eschews chronological order and groups the tracks instead for tonal coherence (though the first and final songs, “Chinese Blues” and “Before You Were Young,” do mark the beginning and end of the character’s day).

Fusing together a multitude of influences and showcasing a fair share of erudite literary allusions, “Ode to J. Smith” is by far Travis’s most grand and ambitious work to date. Even the album title sets the stakes high, ironically echoing Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.”

J. Smith’s day begins dramatically in “Chinese Blues” as jabs of distorted guitar accentuate the vaguely Eastern-sounding piano opening. With his voice sounding the thinnest, the roughest, the hungriest it has since “Good Feeling,” Healy sharply attacks the chorus, really laying into lyrics about betrayal: “It’s the knife in your back / It’s the heart attack / It’s the way you look back before you step out / In time to see the shadow of the one that’s cutting you down.” The song concludes with J. Smith’s decision to kill himself: “There was nobody keeping him here.”

The songs that follow further explore the protagonist’s psychology.

“Get Up,” perhaps the most annoyingly repetitive song on the album, mourns J. Smith’s isolation, how no one will pick up the phone when he calls (the title itself is a call to get up and answer the phone). “Friends” is a low-register, jazz-tinged ballad about the falsity of his friends. “Friends / Won’t ever desert you / Or turn against,” the chorus ironically reiterates.

“Last Words,” chronicling J. Smith’s final utterances, reaches the melodic peaks of Travis’s earlier music, although there are new, darker undertones. Jingling, jangling, paced by drumstick clacks, it manages to seem almost upbeat despite its pessimistic lyrics. Apparently, J. Smith looks forward to the next world: Healy breaks off about singing “of the last words” to cede the spotlight to an unusual Andy Dunlop guitar solo.

In “J. Smith”—the most experimental cut on the album—the protagonist tries to off himself. Beginning with 20 seconds of warring barebone guitar riffs, the song seems to settle into the traditional Travis formula of Healy’s voice over rhythmic guitar and piano. However, the song explodes as Healy, channeling Bob Dylan, belts out the story of J. Smith’s intended suicide: “Oh the mould has been cast / The radio’s in the bath / Yeah yeah yeah.”

The song soars up into an ethereal, polyphonic Latin chorale reciting Smith’s sad tale before the guitars roar and begin a heavy-metal-lite reprise. The song returns to basic rhythm guitar and drums as J. Smith returns to earth and, despite his best efforts, continues to live.

Perhaps no track best delivers the overriding pessimism of “Ode to J. Smith” as “Broken Mirror.” Stealing its synthesized start from The Police’s dystopic “Synchronicity II,” it proceeds in the same vein. The slowest, most downbeat song on the record, it depicts the character looking for guidance from a mirror on the wall—except this mirror is fractured. rather than reassurance, J. Smith finds “a hundred shattered eyes in the looking glass / Staring back at me.” An eerily distorted distant-sounding guitar combines with the everpresent hi-hat cymbal to reinforce the milieu of gloom developed by the lyrics.

“Broken Mirror” also marks a turning point in the album. The songs leading up to it are violent. The beginning of “Something, Anything” blares like the Arctic Monkeys. Healy basically screams all of “Long Way Down,” his voice audibly straining to articulate the rage of his harshest lyrics: “Mama / An eye for an eye / You said you’d never take a side / Papa / I’m too young to die / They’re never taking me / They’re never taking me alive.”

“Broken Mirror” and the songs that follow mellow out. Rage exhausted, only cynicism remains. The chorus likens current disillusionment to Hemingway and the Lost Generation’s loss of faith, “Inside tolls the bell / Outside all is well.”

The record ends, though, on a lighter note.

The final song, “Before You Were Young,” is the song of a man who vacillates between hope and despair. Nostalgic lyrics are coupled with ascending high-pitched piano runs and at the dramatic climax are married to booming cymbals and beating drums as Healy sincerely intones, “If you ever need me call, I will be there waiting when you fall, You know I will / I love you, I love you, I love you…” And yet, despite the seemingly optimistic bent of the track, Healy’s final words linger and haunt as he asks what went wrong: “In the days before you were young / We used to sit in the morning sun/ And turn the radio on / What happened?”

And what did happen to Travis, the compatriots of Coldplay, the band of “Why Does It Always Rain On Me?” fame? The peak of Travis’s career coincided with the release of their sophomore and junior albums, “The Man Who” (1999) and “Invisible Band” (2001). These albums featured ethereally beautiful songs where Healy’s voice melted over layers of guitar, banjo, drums, and tambourine to create confectionary delights. While the lyrics were jaded, the songs were escapist. One could float away on Healy’s lilting vocals as they rose above bells and pleasantly regular guitar chords.

Yes, sometimes Travis played upon the minor chords too heavily, and sometimes they let their songs verge on sweet monotony, but there was a harmony, a beauty that could not be denied. Then in “12 Memories,” Travis brought their gaze to the world and saw their music fall apart.

The darkness they saw upset their precious harmony. Songs like “Peace the Fuck Out” or “Re-offender” were mere propaganda pieces, just outgrowths of their politics. (Travis is an active opponent of the War in Iraq and leads campaigns against poverty and the genocide in Darfur.) The music sucked, the choruses were clunky, the melodies stuck in depressive repetition.

Finally, in “Ode to J. Smith,” they have managed to personalize their politics and preserve their beauty. Through the character of J. Smith they attack modern society. And unlike their previous work, it is neither painful to listen to, nor is it so precious that their lyrics’ power dissipates in the clouds of mellifluence. Rather, the beauty present makes the stark message that Travis dispenses listenable. In Travis’s world, after all, if it weren’t for the brilliant melodies one would feel so, so alone.

—Reviewer Sanders I. Bernstein can be reached at sbernst@fas.harvard.edu.