This piece was originally published at Consequence Of Sound in October 2014.
Travis Morrison got his ass kicked twice. In the first instance, the frontman for indie rock act The Dismemberment Plan fell victim to a surprise attack in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. in front of The Gap. Drawing from this, as artists are wont to do, he documented the assault on “My Two Front Teeth, Parts 2 and 3” off his 2004 post-Plan solo album Travistan. As the track’s title suggests, Morrison lost a pair of incisors as a result, an aesthetic insult added to an already frightful injury. Given his witty reference to hockey great Gordie Howe (who’d had four of his own knocked out), one hopes writing the song helped him recover in some way.
The second time Morrison took a beating he was made to endure the first one yet again. While obviously more in word than deed, the Travistan review published at Pitchfork a decade ago reads like that initial sucker punch outside The Gap must’ve felt. Directly below the 0.0 score, writer Chris Dahlen immediately, and then repeatedly, conjures the Georgetown attack from the opening paragraph onward. An unequivocal takedown, the review was a thorough thrashing, not unlike some of those hard-to-watch late-career Mike Tyson fights.