Travis Morrison: Travistan

Lord, Jesus, this album is not good. I wanted so badly to like this thing, but Morrison, the former lead singer of The Dismemberment Plan, decided to turn up the cheese-meter so high that he made that practically impossible do do so. The mid-80’s arcade game samples and electronic noodling would be semi-cool if it weren’t for the damn lyrics–those horrible, horrible lyrics. The Plan, as they were known, always walked that thin line between cutesy and hipster. There was an edgy sarcasm that managed to relay a situation without pushing their tongue complete through their cheek. Morrison has taken the worst of that and turned it just plain ugly. The album is just filled with awful puns and double entendres and terrible similes and whatever those other things are called. It’s just too cutesy to believe. Seriously cringe-worthy stuff. The title Travistan is obviously an illusion to some fictional land that exists inside Morrison’s head–a land that should be nuked and wiped from the world map forever.