Mystery Jets New Album

Yesterday, blonde-headed Adonis Jamie Woolgar of Rough Trade fame invited me to hear some songs from the brand new Mystery Jets album. Being a big fan of the band, I accepted his offer, despite the fact I had to go to Stamford Brook which, for any of you who don’t know, is in south west London, 50 minutes away from our office (especially if you get it wrong and change four times).

The playback was set in the beautiful, IKEA-ambiance-like British Grove studios. The follow up to last year’s ‘Twenty One’ is currently being produced by Chris Thomas who has worked extensively with The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, Badfinger, Elton John, Pulp, The Pretenders, Sex Pistols and INXS. So basically he’s pretttaaay good at his job. I saw him walking around the building quite a bit and wanted to have a quick chat but he looked like he was focused on something else, and I wasn’t going to break his concentration with my idle chatter.

The band have been working on the album for quite some time now, and it looks like it won’t be coming out until maybe March or April. Why so long you may ask? Well, according to their manager the band have been recording each song only when they feel it has bettered the last song they’ve recorded, which is a great idea when you think about it artistic motivation-wise, but on the other hand if they woke up one morning and recorded something like ‘Blue Monday’ they might be in a bit of a sticky place bettering-wise.

SO! The songs. I got to hear 6 tracks which still aren’t fully mixed, and I wrote down some notes on my phone that was made in 1986 so I had to keep saving text after text and I was texting really discreetly in case someone cottoned on and told me any information about the album was embargoed. My notes are pretty brief. The band have certainly grown-up from their ramshackle, hoedown-styled sing-along’s. Not to say they’ve dropped the jubilant Mystery Jets sing-along’s in favour of anything stern and earnest, there are still moments of absolute majesty on most of the songs (I don’t have any track names or any confirmation of where on the album they will feature so sorry about the vague nature of this round-up).

Flecks of Fleetwood Mac, 10cc, Hall & Oats, Electric Light Orchestra and Roxy Music feature throughout, abandoning some of the kitsch moments of ‘Twenty One’ for bigger, bolder sounds and compositions. When they aren’t glamming it up with a bit of yacht rock synths and drum beats, they are crooning away epic-style. The last song, which has got to be the album ender, sticks out as it sounds more influenced by the 90s, it has a darker tinge, some Jesus & Mary Chain swaying guitars, clinking tambourines, and a Motown pace, it’s sort of comparable to what The Big Pink have been doing without their dense wall of sound running throughout it.

Can I just say before I go on, I listened to these songs once with Jamie and then went down into the studio where I proceeded to listen to the same 6 songs but with the band sat around me. It was relatively nerve-wracking when I realised this was about to happen, like when you have to open your birthday presents in front of lots of people and they look for your reaction, only a lot more important than that. I was so nervous in fact that when I walked in to the studio Henry came up to me and said ‘Hello I’m Henry’, to which I replied ‘Hello I’m Henr…I’m Harriet’. I got confused and scared, we have a similar name. Then I proceeded to shake the hands of all of the band and make mistakes, ‘Hello Blaine, good to I see you befo.. Harriet’, ‘Hi Will good songs, meeting you..hi’. You know, just totally fucking up my greetings. They were lovely though, and didn’t expect me to give a track by track opinion, I just said ‘it sounds really good’ and Kapil said ‘yeah you have to say that’ and oh how we laughed.

Back to the tunez. There’s certainly been a bit of heartbreak to inspire these lyrics, choruses involve lines such as:
‘Come back to me tonight!’
‘Will you still love me in the morning?’
‘It’s too late to talk about it?’

Yes someone has clearly been meddling with the tender hearts of these Eel Pie urchins. Either that or such brashly pop-tastic lyrics have been conjured for the pure purpose that they fit so well with the 70s slick drums and whimsical synths. During the third song Will turned around and said ‘this is our Meatloaf moment’ and he was right, big, dramatic synths add some theatrical punches to the solemn tragedy of love lost.

This is their third album and it’s evident that they’ve progressed in their song writing skills. There were already songs on there that sounded like hits, but apparently they still don’t think they’ve written any singles yet. A very exciting prospect indeed. DE END.