Thing of the Day
The Rock Of Travolta return with a new album...
March 3rd 2011
THE ROCK OF TRAVOLTA – Fine Lines (Big Red Sky) 
The
Rock Of Travolta
used to be a pleasant, pocket-sized Godspeed You!
Black Emperor - an instrumental rock band when such things were rarer,
sporting classical strings amongst a variety of added non-rock
instrumentation and an easy-on-the-ear sound. They had atmosphere, a
light moodyness, occasional sparks of greatness - and yes, they were
kind of simple and repetitive underneath, which kind of held them back
and made listening to them just a bit frustrating. When they went away,
quietly falling off the radar the way bands so often do, they were
missed, just a little.
Meanwhile, a hundred and one instrumental Post Rock bands popped up...
some very good, some very... well, um... similar. And meanwhile, The
Rock Of Travolta - experienced, ahead of the game, you might say, went
away and developed into the band they always should have been.
There was a major line-up change, two founder members lost. The good
news: great replacements with equal multi-intrumental talent, including
a cello player with attitude. The evidence: this new album, Fine
Lines...
The opening seconds of the first track, Rock By Numbers, stimulates a strange but perfectly reasonable couple of references: a riff from something on Selling England By The Pound, the perfectly balanced contemporary Krautrock sonics of Quack Quack,
the John Carpenter synthiness of Zombi. (FYI: Quack Quack being a strange,lovely band from Leeds, and Selling England By The Pound
being an album by strange, lovely band called Earlygenesis). Straight
in there with a meaty synth riff and crisp, tough,
rocking-out, The Rock of Travolta are well and truly BACK.
That
opening track is some kind of futurist all seeing eye of a rock beast,
it gives way to expansive passages of prog, medieval folk-flavoured
restraint, bits of that sound like soundtracks to children’s television
shows, and most, most important
of all, they have excellent tunes. What was I saying about their
simplicity holding them back? They've made it an asset now.
Something has been tweaked in the writing - the repetition isn't so
obvious, the sounds are richer, the energy builds and flows with
purpose, with elegant style, rocking out with a deft touch, pieces peppered with keyboard and guitar
detail without drowning in overkill. They have, in about half a dozen ways, hit the sweet spot.
And so it goes on throughout the album. Last March Of The
Acolytes
has those nods to GSYBE, but condensed into a near-pop five minutes,
complete with natural, unforced, just right quiet and loud, moving from
restrained strings to subliminal atmospheric mellodic heavy metal
riffage. The extremely likable The Goddamn Remote
had one person here convinced that it was absolutely HAD to be Quack
Quack - squishy synths, charming, very proggy tunes... then the full-on
Mellotronic middle then had me wondering if the Truckers Of Husk had
come out of hiding, before being told that it was indeed the return of
those Oxford pioneers. OK, that's two slightly obscure UK bands there,
(let's throw in mathrockers You Slut! and make it three) and that's
because for all the prog and post-rock references there's definitely a
sound evolving out there that belongs in the here and now. It's a
subtle, refreshing thing, a blend of lifetimes of listening that's hard
to pin down... an evolution still going on.
The Rock Of Travolta were doing their thing well before the playground
filled up with millions of identical post-rock-by-numbers beard-growing
bands all sharing the same chords, indeed to even tar The Rock Of
Travolta with that post rock brush here in 2011 is to pull them down
when in actual fact they’re fiercely soaring in a more inventive way
than ever. Yes, Oxford’s Rock of Travolta are back, after a
“self-imposed exile”, Who knows where they’re been, what they've been
up to doesn’t really matter, they’re here now and they have a new album
and to put it bluntly, its as positively prog as f**k!
See, the question has to be, why do all those instrumental post rock
bands all noodle around sharing the same one tune between them? The
same quiet build it up to a crescendo formula, the same polite moves?
There are other ways of doing it, of challenging yourselves. Rock Of
Travolta know this, they’re flying all over the place, proper prog
adventure. The album is alive with bits of reference points, nothing
too obvious: bits of Genesis, bits of King Crimson, Yes, Can, touches
of classic IQ -
their rocking bite, their dirty edges, lot of
old references but this is very much a thing of now. Nothing retro or
re-hashed here, just healthy flavours, positive ingredients to throw
into their rather different prog cake. The Rock of Travolta are
sounding even leaner and fresher then they ever have, this is a sound
and style that’s direct and to the point in a very expansive dynamic
scenic way. The Rock Of Travolta's new album is a triumph.
Fine Lines is released on March 14th 2011
A free download of Last March of the Acolytes is available from: www.therockoftravolta.com/
