I'd like to humbly ask my peers to stop using "ex-Mclusky" tag with these guys, because with Travels With Myself and Another, they're done fucking around. Every seemingly strange left turn from their debut, Curses, is stranger, carried further, and more focused and much catchier here. The band still starts and stops on a dime, the vocals are still layered and ambitious even when seething, the song titles still raise a challenging bar for the music to live up to ("Yin/Post -Yin", "You Need Satan More Than He Needs You"), and the low-end on the guitars still sound like angry bears. Granted, this is how both Mclusky and FOTL built the niche that drew in a loyal, fervent audience, but Travels is the sound of band who still have a lot they want to prove.
With a few striking exceptions, most of the keyboards from the band's debut have been ditched in favor of searing guitar tones (see "Chin Music" or "Land of My Formers"). Many of the albums' hooks come from strident, almost militaristic melodies-- I doubt that "Arming Eritrea" is too concerned with real geography, but damned if I wouldn't help fund the revolt now after the record's screaming, indelible opening track. The woozy march of "The Hope That House Built" is an existentialist call-to-arms, while the mid-tempo chug of "I Am Civil Service" floats up a few melodic, playful bars just to shoot down with its blistering chorus. Straightforward and snarling, these tracks suggest the band still thinks modern rock might be a genre worth infiltrating and upending.
But about those keyboards: "Throwing Bricks at Trains" is a spirited pub sing along over an organ that sounds soggy with distortion. Falkous documents small-town boredom with surprising empathy and charm here (not to mention barbershop-worthy background vocals), though is a little more haunted or torn elsewhere. He's nearly theatrical on "You Need Satan More Than He Needs You", the most synth-heavy and yet the most pummeling track here, finding layers of neuroses in devil worship. The record loses some steam after "Satan"; most any record probably would. They follow it up with some Saturday-morning-cartoon psychedelia on "Yin/Post yin", manic tales of families shamed by plastic silverware ("Stand By/Your Manatee") and delirious amounts of guitar-string scrapes and syncopated vocals ("Drink Nike").
Closer "Lapsed Catholics" starts out with something new for the band-- acoustic guitar-- while inscrutable joke lyrics lead into more locally-aimed bile and more existential pondering, before punctuating it all with one of the record's most titanic riffs halfway through. Throughout the album, Falkous sets up binaries in his lyrics to be tugged between: home and abroad ("when in Rome remember home is always here for you," he sings in "Land of My Formers") Satan worship and practical dress, the cynics of "Arming Eritrea" and the “fighters and buggers” who “have it right” in “Chin Music”, and those "who know who they were, and who they will be again" against those doomed to continue figuring it out in the dark ("Lapsed Catholics"). Even without these extra layers, Travels With Myself and Another might be the finest soundtrack for slam dancing, fast driving, heavy drinking, or whatever poor decision you make this year. But in addition finding new ways to snarl in their music, the lyrics go beyond mere cleverness into sharp, thoughtful introspection, making Travels a document of a creatively restless band out to prove something to themselves, and not just the fans they’ve picked up along the way.
