Artist: Jet
Label: EMI Records
Release: 2009
Length: 40.23
Rating: 2/5
Jet, Australia’s MTV-style export product of the new era, party rockers who rocked the planet in 2003 with their debut “Get Born”, are releasing a new studio album after a three-year break, their first for EMI Records. When they hit the scene in 2003, they certainly brought some badly needed freshness to the waters of mainstream rock and pop. They drew on the legacy of the seventies, combined the melodiousness of The Beatles, added a Clash-like raunchiness and cranked up the guitar licks too, which might have reminded some of a few lessons from their countrymen AC/DC. A great answer to the growing boredom that the self-recycling of Brit pop and the staleness of an ever more arrogant Oasis were serving up just a few years earlier.
But despite the sizable pause before “Shaka Rock”, during which the band could have gathered their thoughts and channeled them into exploration and progressive development, the new album offers nothing new. Jet have started repeating themselves, self-generating, struggling to rehash a successful past, trying to market themselves on the same principles. It would all be fine if they had squeezed enough of themselves out and served up the recycling (one more time) in a new, witty, fresh way. So the brief evolution has stalled and the self-parody just doesn’t ignite anymore.
The track that tries to capture the colossal success of their 2003 hit Are You Gonna Be My Girl is most obviously echoed in She’s A Genious, which of course already came out as a hit single in June 2009. Take away a bit of the main pattern from the evergreen hit by (long-defunct) The Knack, My Sherona, and add a pinch of The Ramones’ “O-O-O-O-O-Oh” engraving in the chorus, and of course the whole thing can work a treat, right? The new Jet hit She’s A Genious is typical Jet flirting with seventies retro rock, but the thing works differently, Jet-like enough, and doesn’t represent a degradation into pure recycling. So that’s a more successful moment on the album, which unfortunately is one of the rarer ones.
Otherwise it’s a typical ride down the middle between the not-too-loud (still) organic retro sound of guitars, of course in the new production far more controlled and polished, underpinned by often simple rhythms that invite you to dance, from the opening Killed In Action to Times Like This, or even more obviously in Beat The Repeat, which, especially thanks to the vocal style in this song, conjures up some old-timers a la B52’s.
La Di Da is another more successful moment on the album, and Nick Cester’s vocals couldn’t work much better. Of all the tracks, La Di Da smells the most post-Brit rock, and the vibes from Kaiser Chiefs or Franz Ferdinand won’t be foreign to you here. Seventeen opens on keyboards straight out of the style of (I’m about to pass out!) Toto’s Hold The Line, but luckily after three seconds a sweet vocal kicks in and the song takes on a connotation of The Beatles’ legacy. It’s the album’s second single, which is considerably less interesting, supple and witty than She’s A Genious. Start The Show irreversibly grabs the levers of the old hard rock school and is the hardest-hitting moment on the album, with a rhythmic undercarriage beefed up by a cowbell. Of course there’s the gruff Cester, who covers up these flirtations with his punkish singing. You really feel a pinch of AC/DC at this point. Incredible. And again, sadly, not interesting enough. Maybe the blame lies in the album not breathing with greater dynamics and variety, and to a large extent in the one-dimensional singing, or rather I’d say yelling, screaming and gruffness, of vocalist Nick Cester, who isn’t prepared to dig deeper into the individual figures of the songs’ lead motifs and breathe more subtlety into those moments.
The album leaves plenty of intangibility and emptiness as we make our way through the tracks Walk, Goodbye Hollywood, Let Me Out, Beat The Repeat etc… even the closing She Holds The Grudge doesn’t leave a particular impression. So the new album is nice, party rock with a noticeable poppy aftertaste, but it drowns in self-parody and Jet’s inability to offer freshness and wit with it and take a step forward in their development. That would have made the album appealing to listen to at any moment. There’s nothing wrong with recycling. The whole world of rock n’ roll has actually worked that way for an entire era of humankind. But how much wit and individual recognizability a given band manages to wrap the “old” in so it looks new and recognizable at the same time is the fact that separates the good from the average. This time Shaka Rock fails to peek out of the gray of mediocrity.
Lineup
Nic Cester – vocals, rhythm guitar, piano
Cameron Muncey – guitar, backing vocals
Mark Wilson – bass guitar
Chris Cester – drums
Production
Jet & Chris “Frenchie” Smith
Tracklist
1. K.I.A. (Killed In Action) (3:28)
2. Beat On Repeat (2:30)
3. She’s A Genius (2:58)
4. Black Hearts (On Fire) (3:13)
5. Seventeen (3:41)
6. La Di Da (2:53)
7. Goodbye Hollywood (4:12)
8. Walk (3:07)
9. Times Like This (3:19)
10. Let Me Out (3:11)
11. Start The Show (3:58)
12. She Holds A Grudge (4:17)
