For the second album, Meeks essentially gets his shot at the control room. Not only are session musicians, samplers, world beats, and an entire orchestra at his disposal, but also a certain young singer by the name of Nicole Scherzinger, who after this would rocket to fame as front woman of the Pussycat Dolls. And the end result is predictable - he abuses the privilege, by giving us an album that is even heavier on the excess and ego than the first one was. Actually, that is a big part of what makes this album interesting, and fascinating, on a lot of levels. Meeks is coming out of his grunge and rock-conservative shell, so it is refreshing to hear his acoustic-based grumble forcibly married to techno beats like on "Enemy". Scherzinger here sounds nothing like her Doll persona, cooing away as if she is Travis' spiritual muse on about half of the tracks. Speaking of the spiritual aspects, I think that is the vibe Meeks was going for on this album. On many tracks, he aims to present himself as some sort of wise, ahead-my-time, know-all, musical and spiritual guru, which is very oft-putting. Especially when you get to these go-nowhere tracks on the record like "Longfellow" that are just mindless instrumentals. It seemed like the pursuit of that image of himself obscured the fact that he still had to produce material that was listenable. Overall, what we have is a big, beautiful sounding nothing burger.
The combination of Scott Litt, Travis Meeks, and the rest of the group comes off like your wanna-be cool uncle mentoring his uber-talented but wayward nephew and his stoner friends, giving them free rein to make the music as meandering as possible…just as long as there are a few key moments to latch onto. And I mean, it does drag on for a loooong time - 72 minutes of this, including a 15 minute interminable thing at the end called "Cling".
