Track Listing

1. All I Want To Do Is Rock
2. U16 Girls
3. Line Is Fine
4. Good Day To Die
5. Good Feeling
6. Midsummer Nights Dreamin'
7. Tied To The 90's
8. I Love You Anyways
9. Happy
10. More Than Us
11. Falling Down
12. Funny Thing

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29707 in Music
• Released on: 2004-12-13
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Debut albums are curious things: they can either be the frenzied spunking of every idea the band's ever had, leaving them spent by the time of their second album; or they can be a romp in the dressing-up box, trying on different musical personas with an eye to the future. Travis's Good Feeling falls into the second category: still working out a Teenage Fanclub and a Radiohead fixation, the simple, still beauty of The Man Who seems a long way off. Instead, Travis crank up the bounceometer: "U16 Girls" and "Tied To The 90's" are obviously forged in the heat of the toilet-circuit moshpits; and the awesome "All I Want To Do Is Rock" the sound of teeth ground down to powder in frustration. Presumably exhausted, the stripped-down "I Love You Anyways", "Falling Down" and "Funny Thing" come right at the very end, harbingers of Travis's future austere classicism. --Caitlin Moran

Customer Reviews

Overlooked gem
Travis' Good Feeling is often overlooked and most people don't even realise they existed before The Man Who but that's no reason why this superb album should be neglected. The sound is neatly summed up by the first track 'All I Want To Do Is Rock'. This album has flashes of early Radiohead and the gritty sound and Fran's vocals on tracks like 'Good Day To Die' and 'Good Feeling' will surprise a few Travis fans but there are also the bouncy sing-a-long songs like 'Tied To The 90s' and 'Happy'. The quieter songs like 'More Than Us' and 'I Love You Anyways' are simply sublime and make the album worth adding to your CD collection.

The rough guitar sound, which is laced onto most of the tracks, makes sense when you consider that the album was released in the Britpop era of around 1997. The album has soaked up the contemporary influences and produced something genuinely engaging to the auditory senses. The first track I heard by Travis was 'U16 Girls'. I thought they were brilliant and deserved mainstream success. I almost thought they wouldn't make it because this album sank when first released but they proved me wrong!

In my humble (but correct) opinion..
There are two reasons why I've always argued that this is the greatest debut album ever made. Firstly, there are a lot of debut albums that I've not yet heard, so I'm open to the possibility that one day my opinion may just be subject to change. Secondly, and probably more importantly, it's stupendous. It does everything a debut should do; buzzing with the kind of joyous euphoria that only a bunch of scamps enjoying their first crack at the whole rock 'n' roll thing can convincingly pull off, whilst being undercut with just enough melancholia to ensure that (if you'll pardon the mangled metaphor), once the pop fizz has dispersed, there's still plenty here to get your teeth into.

For a neat summary of the Travis gameplan, look no further than opening track 'All I Want To Do Is Rock' - the teenage dream summed up in seven words, and we're not even past the first song title. And then there's 'U16 Girls', a cautionary tale of the dangers of underage seduction, but wrapped up in a pop melody so shiny you can see your face in it. Another key moment comes at the end of 'Midsummer Nights Dreamin'', a tumultuous ode to youthful excess. As the song shudders to a joyously noisy climax, accompanied by crunching guitars and Fran Healy's increasingly yelped vocal, you can't help but wish they'd let themselves go like this on their later albums; when they do, the results are spectacular.

To finish things (Travis not being ones to do things by halves), instead of one traditional end of album slowie, we get four. The last four songs on the album (not counting 'Happy' - a more self-explanatory title of a song there has never been, except perhaps for Radiohead's 'I'm Unhappy, But In An Opaque And Slightly Arty Way') are given over to a quartet of slow numbers so gosh darn lovely that they could legitimately have put all future balladeers out of work forever. In fact, by the time the impeccably restrained 'Funny Thing' drifts off into the ether, it's difficult to reconcile it with the gleeful bounce and energy that grabbed your attention forty nine minutes ago at the start of this remarkable slab of Scottish songsmithery, leaving the only realistic option being to return back to the start and listen to the whole thing again.

Frantastic
Helpfully, Travis have neatly summed up several of the songs here in the titles; All I Wanna Do Is Rock is a manifesto they stick to well for the first half of their implausibly stunning debut album, the joyous exuberance practically oozing out of the speaker cones. Happy? Good Feeling? If there's one thing they may be guilty of, it's stating the blindingly obvious. But they have a dark side, with the likes of Good Day To Die and the jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly gorgeous closing quartet of songs (interrupted by 'Happy'; this is a pop album after all) reminding us that even the sunnniest of skies can harbour a few clouds now and again. Travis have given this album everything, and the results are liable to make you wish you really could live forever, if only to listen to this on repeat until the CD player wears out.