The Visitors - Travelling
EP
This
is a mightily impressive record, people. Mightily impressive in that
it challenges, for the sheer volume of cliché-ridden, meaningless
butchering of the English Language, almost any other in the history
of popular music.
Portsmouth's The Visitors peddle
inoffensive, if rather bland, countryfied pop-rock; think a British
(although you might not know it from the cod-Midwest accents)
version of Train (remember Drops of Jupiter?)
Still, on Another Day they at least
craft a sunny, catchy guitar refrain and forge an atmosphere of
janty rurality which sounds rather like the Due South theme tune. Or
the title song for an American version of Heartbeat. Lucrative
careers in jingle writing await for main men James Dyer and Ross
Ingram.
They might want to find a lyricist,
though. Anything to prevent such monstrosities as "So when you
find that you're stuck in the traffic now, you gotta take some time
to find your way out" (from Double Dutch) receiving widespread
radio play. Tom Tom will be planning their next ad campaign around
it any time now.
Front to back, Travelling is a
world where our narrator is gonna "sell my soul to the
devil", and "be there til the end", where
"things have gotta change" and "lightning never
strikes in one place twice". To out-cliché the cliché-ers:
You couldn't make it up. Steve McClaren's press conferences contain
fewer insubstantial platitudes.
Promised Land is a hideously upbeat
cocktail of 90s rejects Toploader and Reef, like the soundtrack to
the cheesy wedding scenes at the end of bad romantic comedies. Look
around and someone's probably throwing flowers in the air. Then
again, if lines like "Come with me, take that look off your
face, and we'll take you through to a better place" are going
to drag you out of clinical depression and onto the path to
righteousness, then get your hands on this and stick it with your
Paul McKenna books.
In fairness, the band are more than
technically adept and the use of pedal steel and Hammond organ
imbues certain tracks with interesting textures. But, unless you're
currently hooking the caravan up to the Volvo estate and planning an
air-conditioned drive to the Lakes, The Visitors are of limited
interest.
Reviewed By:
Rich Partington
