Forget possible-is it even acceptable these days to be taken completely off-guard and suddenly blown away by a half-tossed song lyric? I’m talking the “did he just say ohmygodhedid” smile/nod/replay sort of instant affection that grows, play after play, with a simply well-done song.
I, then, point to Lily Allen (she of the formerly-Res-faved-still-well-liked who technically can’t be written about here on Res any longer fame, we still have mad <3 for you, Lily) as being responsible for me giving the new album from the Mystery Jets the second chance it needed to make me fall madly for it just now.
On her myspace blog today, amongst other stuff, Lily wrote:
By the way, the Mystery Jets new album is soooooo amazing, the song with Laura marling is great, but Flakes is my favourite track I think. Erol Alkan produced the record and I think it’s the best album I’ve heard this year. Sounds pretty 80’s in parts in fact it inspired me to do a Joe Jackson cover the other day, Stepping Out. Don’t worry you’ll never have to hear it.
I’ve always really wanted to like the Mystery Jets. On paper, their former album (which actually had room and space to breathe in the UK, while for us in the U.S. “last album” is equal to “finally got over here a handful of months ago in preparation for a new-new album”) Zootime read like a dream-influenced by the FAC stuff, Bowie, U2, etc etc bla bla bla and then came out sounding like some cafe-pop with Rock addlings. There was a weird appeal to the mash, though, and so when this new record, Twenty One, was announced, with Erol helming the mixing, I immediately assumed bad things. Levels-to-red things. Tiefschwarz-sounding things. I was very, very wrong.
Lily’s right-Twenty One is 80’s-inspired, if only in that it’s just a fantastic, synthy-slicked BritPop record. These kids aren’t reinventing any wheels, they’re just having a hell of a time driving the ones they have-and that, honestly, is why the first time I listened to the new record in its’ entirety I, more or less, let it get filed away into the “another shot at another time” file. I kept waiting for the melodic vocals, the soaring harmonies, the glistening guitar work to blow up into some sort of Transcapade-led bass-ripper that would lend itself to Erol, well, being overly concerned with making “the kids dance”. Instead, the entire lot have made a collection of songs that, while not as booksmart algebraic as the Foals record, is a hell of a lot more listenable…and relistenable, and craveable, and emotional, and fun.
This is the one that got me. The song that sniped me. The sneaky fucker that snuck up behind me with a glowing chorus, a little bit of a block on the step, and suddenly, into the every-day song about, well, the girl next door, threw the line:
” I hear that she likes to dance around the room
To a worn out 12″ of Marquee Moon”
To which I can simply respond, head in my hand: “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck”. We haven’t dated the same girls, and I know that-at least, the logical facet of my brain is cognizant of this fact. However, with a lyric like that, sung like that, in a song like this-there’s a whole generation of guys who know the same girl, that one, with the hair and the eyes and that dress who dances in her living room with the shades up and the volume up and the crush-factor turned to 11. It’s a uniting moment, a modern take on, oh, something Bono would probably do (NOT the “Edge, play the blues” bit) to feign intimacy, but here there’s nothing fake about it. The girl who lives two doors down here is every girl who lives two doors down from every boy, and these boys have just made a damn good song about it.
Seriously, the rest of Twenty One is spectacular-each song for its own different reason.
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