Li’l
Cap’n Travis
…In
All Their Splendor
On
In All Their Splendor, Li’l Cap’n Travis perform a basic
mechanical-alchemical modification - as seen in the back pages of Popular
Mechanics magazine’s June 1978 issue - to transform an old 8-track player
into a time machine. The device can be used to go both forward and backward in
time; using it, one might return to the site of one’s worst romantic humiliation
and say what one should have said to that girl in the swimming pool, or
one might instead prefer to beam into the passenger’s seat of their old Mustang
and advise their 16-year old self to just give up on the mustache. Flip a little
switch, though, and not only people but objects and moments can transport
themselves through time into a more modern era. A ray of sunshine from a certain
summer day might be made to slip forward through a gap of 15 years and play on a
pile of Lone Star empties as one is waking up hung-over on a Tuesday morning,
for example. A certain guitar lick heard and felt most keenly in one’s teenage
bedroom headphones at 2:58 in the morning might be miraculously rediscovered,
whole and exactly as remembered, shimmering through the air of an auto parts
store.
In All Their Splendor is a record as wistfully, heartbreakingly magnetized by
nostalgia, and its skill at translating that nostalgia into blissful modern pop
recalls such albums as The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society
and Big Star’s #1 Record. The members of this band have lived and
breathed classic rock - not only 70's hard rock but Motown laments,
Southern-fried guitar wankery, sunny psychedelic sway,
good-time country-rock, languidly introspective songcraft - for so long that it is alive in them, and their
music is not an imitation of it but an unselfconscious, uncalculated,
unquestioning continuation of everything it has taught them. As with Beachwood
Sparks, My Morning Jacket, or the Thrills, these songs are too emotionally
committed and stylistically eclectic to read as retrogression - they don’t
openly ape any one old style so much as they remind us what rock felt like when
you were a teenager and it was, too. The charming scenery and the beautiful
girls and the body-temperature water aren’t how the world really is –
they’re how you secretly remember it being - but the real heartbreak and pain
stings like it only can the very first time. There is an undiluted, boyishly
naive romanticism to these tracks, casually outfitted in their shimmering, gauzy
layers of omnichord and old synthesizers, gorgeous
swells of pedal steel, brazenly hooky rock licks. These songs look you long and
deep in the eye, and though you can tell they’re totally stoned, beneath that
there is an earnestness that endears powerfully.
The five
members that comprise LCT (four of which sing lead on In All Their Splendor) practically live
in the very dive bars whereof they sing. They’ve logged countless long hours in scores of
Austin, TX indie-rock, gospel, country, and folk
bands. This is their third album and their first for glurp. As in the past, the
wry humor, adept musicianship, catholic pop know-how, and general laconic
goodwill that have made the band such a huge Austin draw are apparent all over
this disc. Present here more consistently than ever before, though, is a subtle
seriousness of intent, yearning, and emotional commitment. Married to their dead-on pop songwriting
sensibilities, this commitment limns their tales of used-car salesman, country
girls on the wing, teenage losers, and hapless castaways, investing their
stories with just enough tenderness so that you see too much of yourself
reflected inside to laugh. It’s a difficult, dizzying line to walk - the line
between humor and pathos, between longing for the past and living in the present
- and not anyone can get away with it. Fortunately, Li’l Cap’n Travis has the
technology.
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CD
STREETDATE:
05/18/04
CONTACT:
dana@drunkdatepr.com
415-495-0150 or eric AT glurp.com 512-440-1921