Excuses For Travellers

I've been a fan of Mojave 3 after hearing their single Return to Sender on epitonic, soon after I bought Spoon and Rafter, which coincidentally is just as good, however it was upon purchasing Excuses for Travellers, that I realised that this was their best work. Each carefully written and composed track on this album is amazing, with it's soothing melancholy feeling.

Neil Halsteads voice suits the music perfectly, it's almost effortless and flows perfectly. The opening track is a gorgeous, dreamy pop song, with its careful build-up, before simmering off at the end. There's not a great deal of musical diversity over the other albums, but, the catchy melodies persist, and nothing ever feels rushed. Take track 3, My Life as Art, one of the highlights of the album, it has one of the quietest intros, sparse guitar accompanying Halstead's whispery vocals, and the whole song has this laid-back charm.

There are some slightly more upbeat songs, such as the excellent Return to Sender, Anyday will be Fine, and Krazy Koz. Another highlight on the album is Bringing me Home, where Rachel adds the vocals, which makes a nice change, as she has an excellent voice. Mojave 3 are a dreamier Red House Painters, and Excuses for Travellers is most certainly the bands best achievement to date. If you want a record that is plaintive yet blissful, and with enough perfection to charm the birds out of the trees, then this album is a good purchase.

Has there ever been a better album than this? Well I've listened to many and decided that there hasn't. Mojave 3 have composed such a beautiful, melancholy, caressing album, not only providing you with sounds for the soul, they also kindly throw in lines you can quote in any situation, summing up exactly how you feel. This album seems so simple, you know a lot of talent must be behind it - it makes you wish you could write stuff like this. It's just perfect, nothing to be excused.

I adore Mojave 3's first album, but my enthusiasm was severely dampened by the follow-up, and as a result I didn't get hold of their third until chancing upon it in a thrift store last year. It wasn't that Out Of Tune was poor, more that they were moving away from the shimmering magic that I found so compelling on Ask Me Tomorrow, in favour of a rather well-beaten track to the dusty heart of a mythical America.

Excuses For Travellers is a curious one, upon the first few listens it seemed to be living in the exact same space as Out Of Tune, adding little if anything artistically to what has been said before, to the point where large swathes of it seemed a bit un-necessary. However, it didn't take long to fall head over heels for the gorgeous opening track, "In Love With A View", which I feel I cannot live without, whilst other blissful highlights such as "My Life In Art" also have me ensnared. Rachel Goswell's gentle vocal on "She Broke You So Softly", meanwhile, is a perfect example of the symbiosis of hers and Neil's voices, of how good that sounds.

At the same time I have niggling concerns, that I can't overlook, so the journey through the album can become a conflict of feelings (and here I fear I might disrupt the general expressions of admiration as described by all other reviewers here to date, but know that I respect their points of view and have felt similarly towards "Ask Me Tomorrow"). Firstly I'm a little distracted by just how close Neil Halstead is prepared to tread to his sources of inspiration, "Trying To Reach You" for example sounds distinctly like it's going to be a cover of Neil Young's "Lotta Love" until the vocals kick in, but even then "Lotta Love" lingers in the background like a ghost. I also feel we are travelling in the slipstream of folks like Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake. At my most cynical I start to wonder whether Mojave 3 have anything in their repertoir that isn't assembled from a kit, I've started to suspect that the songs that sound the most original to my ears might just be close copies of songs I've never heard. Should this matter? Perhaps it shouldn't.

The feeling of deja-vu also extends to their own back-catalogue, practically every track has something about it, a turn of phrase or a musical motif, that nearly duplicates something previously tried on the first or second albums, for instance "She Broke You So Softly" seems to contain fragments of "Where Is The Love", whilst a verse from "Return To Sender" harks back to "Yer Feet".

Nevertheless, when I'm happy, I'm very happy, Mojave 3 create such an inviting, luxuriant place of calm and some truly beautiful music.