Artist: Mystery Jets
Label: Rough Trade Records
Release: 2012
Duration: 52:00
Rating: 3.5/5
English indie rockers and eccentrics Mystery Jets hail from southwest London, more precisely from the bohemian quarter of Eel Pie Island (a little islet in the middle of the Thames). The island is best known as the home of the biggest hippie commune in England and as the location of the famous Eel Pie hotel, where bands and musicians like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, The Yardbirds, Davie Bowie… played their first gigs in the sixties. Mystery Jets officially came together around 2004, although the two main protagonists of the band, singer Blaine Harrison and guitarist William Rees, go back to primary school together. When they started out, the band grabbed attention for three things. The first was that singer Blaine is disabled (he has a condition called Spina Bifida, which in his case means partial paralysis of the leg muscles). The second was that his father Henry Harrison played in the band too. The two are connected, since his dad had always played a sort of protector to Blaine, which is understandable given the condition. After the first album Henry stepped into the background and left the young guys (besides singer Harrison and guitarist Rees, the band also featured drummer Kapil Trivedi and bassist Kai Fish) total freedom in shaping the band and its music. The third thing was the guerrilla gigs (modeled on The Libertines), which they played unannounced all over London, most often on their home turf of Eel Pie Island.
»Radlands« is the band’s fourth full-length. The wild, playful, progressive debut »Making Dens« could also be described as a kind of ode to their biggest inspiration, Syd Barrett (who, along with later-era Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Bowie and Fripp, had the biggest influence on the band). The second album »Twenty One« shot them into »mainstream« orbit. A mix of sweet melodies and catchy lyrics gave birth to the widely embraced, critically praised songs Two Doors Down, Young Love, Flakes and Half In Love With Elizabeth. In this period they also established themselves as great live performers, always spicing up their shows with an extravagant stage look. The third album, the sexual »Serotonin«, is their best-reviewed record, though with the wider audience it didn’t repeat the success of its predecessor. Musically it’s best described as dreamy electro-art-pop-rock.
The band’s sound could be boiled down to a fusion of the following four traits: melancholy, psychedelia, catchy melodies, and frontman Harrison’s fragile yet angelic voice.
”The fourth album will be made far away from home…” Blaine Harrison kept repeating after the end of the Serotonin tour. In the first and so far only interview since the release of »Radlands«, guitarist William revealed that the decision to write and record the album outside London was down to a lack of inspiration the city had been giving them. Mystery Jets have always been a London band, and they wrote and recorded all three of their previous albums at home, so this London burnout is nothing out of the ordinary. With the help of Mallick’s film Badlands, they found their inspiration on the other side of the pond, along the Colorado River in Texas. They settled into a wooden house by the river, writing songs by day and recording or partying by night. The album’s name is a portmanteau of Badlands (Mallick’s film) and Redlands (Keith Richards’ English estate, where the Rolling Stones went through their famous drug raid), which can be read as a bridge between an English guitar band and a wanderer roaming the landscape along the Colorado River. They even named their Texas studio Radlands. Harrison says they wanted to make an album that sounds like Mallick’s Badlands looks.
While the entire English »mainstream« music scene is feeding on dubstep beats and other electronica, Mystery Jets decide to make ”their own version” of a country album. The album is indeed marked by country, americana, folk, blues and western influences, but it still holds on to some genuine ”Mystery Jets-y” substance, and it comes pretty close to the latest output of their ”sibling” bands from England: The Maccabees and Foals, and even Bombay Bicycle Club. Radlands is without a doubt their most mature creation, and also their darkest. It’s far more introspective and personal than Serotonin and marks a real departure from their other albums. The existential and religious aspects are especially present. Genre-wise the album is hard to pin down; it has elements of desert rock, carries the legacy of indigenous American musical genres, and also has a melancholy English core. It’s the band’s first concept album, telling the story of Emmerson Lonestar, a musician wandering across America, longing for love and lamenting his failed relationships. This fictional character, Emmerson Lonestar, is someone onto whom the members of Mystery Jets could project their own experiences. The whole album is based on real personal stories.
After a reasonably successful first album, it’s usually the second one that proverbially turns out to be the turning point (for the band’s very existence as well as on the lineup and musical level), confirming or refuting the one-hit-wonder claim. Mystery Jets have already been through that and proven their quality, but their fourth album brought a change in lineup on top of a more experimental musical twist. The band members got a real little shock when, a month before the album came out, the charismatic bassist Kai Fish announced he was leaving the band. Fish had already hinted last autumn, with the release of his solo album Life In Monochrome, that his heart wasn’t in the mother band anymore. For the tour they’ve expanded the band by two new members, bassist Peter Cochran and pedal steel guitarist Kieran Morrison.
The album opens with the title track ‘Radlands’, ushered in by a gentle, dusty, melancholy line of bass and guitar, whose high repetitive tones evoke a similar feeling of rapture to the start of Spanish Sahara by Foals. The memorable and witty opening couplet already turns this meaningfully on its head: ”I’ve heard there’s a place where we go to die / It’s a terribly overrated horse-shit shaped hole in the sky”. The song ratchets up the tension with every second, with exploding emotional chords pushing it even further. At the chorus, thanks to the unforgettable pedal steel guitar, the song speeds up and sweeps us into pure ecstatic elation. Gorgeous lines follow one after another (e.g. We both know nothing is quite as it seems…/The future gets shorter the longer we wait). The ending is cathartic and liberating. The song is really a faithful reflection of, or perfect association with, Mallick’s film Badlands. It’s a fantasy story about a couple on the run from the police. It talks about heaven, hell and mortality. It carries a certain vitalist legacy: live while you can. Live so your life doesn’t end too soon. The song is very Springsteen-esque, though even a Tom Petty wouldn’t be ashamed of it. The second track on the album is called ‘You Had Me At Hello’. It’s defined by a prominent bass sound that sets up a great dialogue with the acoustic guitar, and by warm guitar distortion during the chorus. A heartbreaking, soulful song, with this beautiful line standing out most: ”I want you to love me as if you’ve got no principles”. The song works as a kind of homage to The Eagles, and musically it’s also very close to Fleetwood Mac and Neil Young. The next track, ‘Someone Purer’, is the only single from the record so far. Interestingly, they shot two music videos, one for the English-European market and another for the American one. It’s definitely one of the best Mystery Jets songs. Harrison says the song is about seeing beauty in things and about how we have to dare. The beginning is slow and depressive, but just like Radlands, it keeps opening up with tension. Guitarist Rees builds the song up with a magical tremolo riff that even U2’s famous The Edge wouldn’t be ashamed of. The song deals with the question of the meaning of life and with our inner struggle. Wrestling with yourself, with your own purity, with the other within. A brutal confrontation with ourselves. When you’re a child, you’re still free of sins; that’s why memories keep dragging us back. The solution lies in hope, in positivity: despite mistakes and sins you have to move on; the chorus works like a new beginning, like an impulse for change: ”So deliver me from sin / give me rock and roll”. It reminds me of some Arcade Fire songs. The first three tracks form an excellent triad. From here on the songs are no longer quite as convincing, but they do open up a new ”americana” dimension of Mystery Jets that we’re not used to.
The fourth track is called ‘The Ballad Of Emmerson Lonestar’. It’s a song that sketches the album’s main protagonist. It’s graced by excellent fingerpicking, slide guitar and gorgeous harmonies. The folk and country influences are very obvious here. Among newer musicians you can feel a Bon Iver-ish tinge in it, while among older ones it recalls some of John Mellencamp’s work. Members of Mumford & Sons could surely have put their names to this song as well. The track ‘Greatest Hits’ will surely become the greatest hit about greatest hits. There are few similar meta music hits. With this song Mystery Jets prove they still know how to write a pop smash. Definitely the Two Doors Down of this album. It’s a witty, breezy, summery ”sha-la-la” hit, but one with quite a few fascinating lines, like this one: ”No way your having ‘This Nation’s Saving Grace’ you only listen to it when / Your pissed / But when you sober up it’s always “Why the fuck are you still listening to / Mark E. Smith?” The song is about a couple splitting up their collection of albums they both love at the end of their relationship: ”You can keep ‘No Need to Argue’ and I’ll keep ‘The Aeroplane Over the Sea”. The song is very referential, and you can spot albums or songs by the following bands: ABC, Talking Heads, Lemonheads, Roxy Music, Show Of Hands, The Cranberries, Neutral Milk Hotel, Belle & Sebastian, The Kinks, The Minutemen, Paul McCartney & Wings and The Fall. But it has one (cosmetic) flaw. At times it comes across as the D-list version of Stuck In The Middle With You by Stealers Wheel, who were active in the mid-seventies. The sixth song, ‘The Hale Bop’, works like a hybrid of the Bee Gees, Scissor Sisters and Canadian oddballs Of Montreal: bright country funk mixed with elements of disco. Such a weird combination that even after the fifteenth listen I can’t decide whether it’s good or not. It’s interesting, anyway. Harrison’s fascinating falsetto is worth singling out, though. ‘The Nothing’ sets out to explore the unknown and asks questions about ourselves and whether answers are even possible, since we’re a mystery even to ourselves. It starts off in a kind of electro Gorillaz manner, but after a good ten seconds it flows into a dreamy (lullaby-like) and ethereal ballad. The emotional, powerful falsetto chorus (”bring me back as something beautiful”) can bring you to tears.
A touch of the sixties comes courtesy of the eighth track, ‘Take Me Where The Roses Grow’ . The duet between guitarist Rees and the album’s only guest, Sophie-Rose Harper, is missing something more, some emotional oomph, to make the song stellar. Even a gorgeous slide guitar line, sweet voices and a love-struck lyric (”Take me where the roses grow / To the place where no one knows.”) sometimes aren’t enough. ‘Sister Everett’ is an ode to an evangelist Rees met on a plane (who, by the way, wanted to convert him into a believer). Hammond organ and pedal steel guitar provide a traditional country-folk vibe, while a distinctive drum keeps building the song up, and it feels like it’s about to explode any moment, but then something even better follows: an anthemic outro with gospel singers. The song is a bit reminiscent of Honky Tonk Women by the Rolling Stones. The anthemic ending slips unnoticed into the next, penultimate song on the album, the urban ‘Lost in Austin’. In my personal opinion it’s the best piece on the album and far outdoes even the excellent first three tracks. Brilliant. It’s a full six and a half minutes long. It’s about a drug-fueled breakdown in the middle of Texas. It’s epically structured, containing heavy hard rock riffs as well as calmer but hypnotic sections. It’s a true power ballad. Harrison’s voice ranges from his usual fragile and vulnerable to downright raw and divinely mighty. The ending of this song is similar to Radlands: it sends you into real ecstasy, jumping and dancing around. The album closes with the acoustic, mournful lament ‘Luminescence’ (“You still swim around the canals of my head like cocaine / and yes, it feels good, but not half as it would if you’d stayed.”). It’s easy to imagine it as a campfire song. It feels soothing and pulls us right back to the beginning of the album.
With »Radlands«, Mystery Jets are probably finally opening the door to America too. They’ve widened their sonic landscape even further; the ‘americana’ experiment largely worked. Still, the album lacks the cohesion and completeness we saw in its predecessor, “Serotonin”, even though it’s their first concept record. It doesn’t hit you on the first try like Twenty One, by now almost a folk classic. In terms of progressiveness it’s definitely closest to their chaotic debut “Making Dens”. Anyone who has seen Mallick’s film Badlands will surely hear the connections between the two. The whole aesthetic, the typography of the cover, everything leans very obviously on that cult film from the seventies, and not only that: the whole record spews associations with American (pop) culture of the sixties and seventies; at times you even get the feeling that punk never happened. But that’s not even a bad thing. The album stands up and works. This summer, catching them at one of the nearby festivals is not to be missed.
Lineup
Blaine Harrison – vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar
William Rees – electric guitars, keyboards
Kai Fish – bass, keyboards
Kapil Trivedi – drums, percussion
Production
Dan Carey & Mystery Jets
Tracklist
1. Radlands
2. You Had Me at Hello
3. Someone Purer
4. The Ballad of Emmerson Lonestar
5. Greatest Hits
6. The Hale Bop
7. The Nothing
8. Take Me Where the Roses Grow
9. Sister Everett
10. Lost in Austin
11. Luminescense
