For a music fan, the journey of the Mystery Jets has been exhilarating to watch. When they stumbled onto the scene in 2005 with the still-pretty-amazing “You Can’t Fool Me Dennis”, they seemed to be the proverbial dark horses poised to win over the indie kids’ hearts. In a world of tired Razorlight clones, some Syd Barret-obsessed kid named Blaine Harrison and his middle-aged architect dad gathered a rag-tag group of friends to record an album, Making Dens, that was more Genesis-era Peter Gabriel than Libertines-era Pete Doherty. Then, a few years later, came Twenty-One, an album where the band really began to show their pop roots, especially in the glamorous, incandescent single “Two Doors Down”, the video for which featured Blaine, still rocking the “Dickensian street urchin” look, wearing white sunglasses and singing in front of a pink leopard-print backdrop. Not quite The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, am I right?
This month, Mystery Jets will release Serotonin, their third, and perhaps best, studio album. It’s the perfect blend of the psychede-lite sound of Making Dens and the ’80s pop of Twenty-One: it’s both pointedly intellectual and slightly camp, which is a very, very difficult feat to pull off. While the record retains the core of the Mystery Jets’ sound, i.e. loads of instruments, Blaine’s plaintive vocals and deft lyrical wordplay, it also comes off as a love letter to so many amazingly random ’80s pop bands. Hints of Spandau Ballet (“The Girl is Gone”), XTC (“Show Me the Light”) and, um, Prefab Sprout I guess (the absolutely flawless “Dreaming of Another World”) are Spirographed all over Serotonin, and while to some of our readers that may sound like a really fucked up deal, what makes it commendable is that the band avoids all the general clichés that come with trying to recreate a sound from that era in pop music. This is very far from pastiche; it’s more of a subtle homage while staying totally true to their roots. One listen to the opening guitar riff of “Lady Gray”, which sounds like a jet taking off inside a swimming pool, will put all hardcore Jets fans’ thoughts to rest.
The album jumps off with what is probably the track the most reminiscent of Making Dens, “Alice Springs”, with its crashing cymbals, tight male harmonies and general sense of musical drama. Although it’s a strong track, the band decided to reveal Serotonin to the world by releasing “Flash a Hungry Smile”, a song that begins with a space-disco-y synth arpeggio before before evolving into a mid-tempo number in which Blaine pleads “Oh darling please/I want to see you on your knees,” before understanding that it’s his “hungry smile” that’s driving away all the potentials (and we’ve all been there, right). The record’s title track, again gracefully cribbing its breezy synth line from so many past pop giants, speaks of a girl names Sarah who is giving Blaine near-lethal doses of Sarah-tonin to the heart, while he pleads with her in a lofty falsetto. Yeah, it’s a pun, but since when is great pop music above a good pun?
The crowning achievement however, is “Dreaming of Another World”, Serotonin‘s official lead single and by far the best song on the album. Absolutely infectious from the word go, it’s one of those gigantic earworms of a song that bites into your brain’s pleasure center and refuses to let go. “Dreaming of Another World” seems like the pinnacle of what Mystery Jets wanted to accomplish with Serotonin: holy matrimony between the perfect pop single and their indie convictions. And can I just say, well fucking done.
Mystery Jets have proven that they can create amazing pop music on their own terms, and I, for one, can’t wait to see where the journey takes them next (Rough Trade, 2010).
