This made it difficult now to distinguish between his self-protective professional detachment and some new coldness in his heart. As an indifference cherished, or left to atrophy, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with negations and emotional neglect. One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

At the end of next month, I’ll be 20. I’m at that gateway. I’m leaving behind my teens like an emotionally-gooey albatross. But I, still, feel emotionally gooey. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with my life, I don’t know how I’m going to make money and survive, I don’t know if I’m ever going to find and emotionally content relationship with another girl—or with another human being for that matter, I feel completely discontent with where ever I’m at at any given moment and half the time I just want to stay in my basement bedroom to a point of agoraphobia. It’s a Salingeresque repose, a “phase” in my life, halfway between the clinging emotionalism of childhood, and the stoicism and detachment everyday people use to deal with everyday life. And I’m scared. And I want music to tell me everything’s going to be all right.

Who knows, maybe Travis is the adult lullaby. On The Invisible Band’s first song “Sing,” Fran Healy sings about an emotion problem with his girlfriend that so inane: she won’t sing in front of him. It’s a joke to proclaim, but by the next song “Dear Diary,” the problem clearly hasn’t subsided. He’s back to his teenage solutions in fact. In “Side,” he starts to question the universe about the girl’s problem, admitting that “life is both a major and a minor key,” and by “Flowers in the Window,” he sings with a detached longing about her. By the time of the last song, “The Humpty Dumpty Love Song,” he’s begging her to glue his broken heart back together. Teenage melodrama seems trite in hindsight, but if we take the second to indulge ourselves in it for the tiniest second, it comes flooding back, doesn’t it?

It took me a long time to get over that Travis were the second part in the Trilogy of Radiohead Rip-offs, the others being Muse and Coldplay (both bands who I laud for picking a good source to derive, and don’t think it’s lazy because their work is cut out for them). But what Travis lacks in universal truisms, they make up for in emotional ones. And so on The Invisible Band, Travis continues spinning winsome and lonesome, etching directly into the mind of an overemotional teenager’s engrossed and tearful reading of any given Salinger novel. Fran Healy sings just as overemotionally and gauzey, mumbles still like life has punched him in the stomach too many times, and they still use Nigel Godrich’s OK Computer-like electric wind chime over-dubbing. And, well, it’s still just as beautiful than The Man Who. If not more. “Sing” opens triumphantly and directly, melodically bellowing, “Sing, sing, sing!,” belting out this notion that even the most mundane of emotions that permeate in the human mind must be put into expressible form, and sung.

But, Travis is still space-folk, and each song has identically slow drums which lackadaisically wander like rolling grass in bad high school poetry. Invisible Band has Man Who’s problem in the meandering tempos department, and then some, because it doesn’t have many signature or identifiable melodies to latch the winsome parts on. (In fact, it’s quite a bit like the band’s first album Good Feeling, only it has sonic whimpering and the degrees of growth.) That is, until it’s second half. Songs that the band refuse to acknowledge as being “sad” songs hit their melancholia streak, tug at the heart strings, and dare you to indulge yourself in what you used to (over)feel. And if you let your guard down, just a little, you might sing along too.

Now, I leave you with the truth that Travis gives: it’s unconvincing in this crude prose form (in fact, I think it’s little more than dime-store humanism), but if you let the sounds in, it’ll make sense:

We all live under the same sky
We all will live we all will die
There is no wrong
There is no right
The circle only has one side