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We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls
Wikipedia:
We Were Promised Jetpacks are a Scottish indie rock band, comprising Adam Thompson (vocals, guitar), Michael Palmer (guitar), Sean Smith (bass), Stuart McGachan (keys / guitar / backing vocals) and Darren Lackie (drums / backing vocals). The band's debut album, These Four Walls, was released on 15 June 2009 on Fat Cat Records. In October 2011 the band released their second full-length album, In the Pit of the Stomach. They released E Rey: Live in Philadelphia, a recording of the last show of their 2012 tour, in February 2014.
The band cite label mates, Frightened Rabbit and The Twilight Sad, as influences, alongside Biffy Clyro's early material.
Review:
This debut by FatCat's latest Scottish discovery, We Were Promised Jetpacks, is exactly what you'd expect from the label that gave us the Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit: an anthemic collection of heavily accented singing, insistent rhythms, and intense sincerity. But just because it's not surprising doesn't mean it's not appealing. With songs that marry tough riffs to tender glockenspiels and find a balance between muscular, masculine drumming and singer Adam Thompson’s vulnerable, striving warble, there is much to like within These Four Walls.
Discovered by the label thanks to Frightened Rabbit's MySpace page, We Were Promised Jetpacks are destined for comparison to that band of brothers. It's not just that their accents sound the same-- though, Americans take note, the Jetpacks are from Edinburgh and the Rabbits from Glasgow. Both bands traffic in rousing, emotive guitar pop driven by thundering drumming, though Frightened Rabbit come at it from an acoustic angle and are obsessed with the heaviness of the kick drum, while WWPJ come from a post-punk place where every 4/4 rhythm is punctuated with cymbal 16th notes. And Scotland must really be chilly because both bands are preoccupied with maintaining heat. FR, on their last album, admitted that "it takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm," a theme that appeared on more than just the track called "Keep Yourself Warm". While, coincidentally, WWPJ's best song is "Keeping Warm", a more-than-eight-minute track that spends half of its run time as an instrumental-- spackling glockenspiels, guitars, and what sounds like a saxophone over its increasingly galloping rhythm-- and the other lamenting the loneliness of life.
Perhaps there is something about a thick Scottish accent that allows us to indulge in grandiose emotional sentiments. If an American band gave us a track like "It's Thunder and It's Lightening", with its earnestly soaring melody that explodes out from an insistent strum, it would come off as gratingly emo. But swaddled in glottal stops and guttural consonants, the dramatic changes in dynamic feel earned and the sensitive lyrics feel roguishly honest. Maybe that's also due to the hugeness of WWPJ's drum sound-- maybe it's easier to be sincere without sounding like a pussy when backed by such rumbling, macho percussion? Though "Quiet Little Voices" feels a bit like Bloc Party with a brogue, thanks to the clinical skitter of its cymbal-heavy attack, "Short Bursts", which sounds like it was recorded in an echo-y cave, is fast and messy with all of its other elements racing to keep up with its tribal pounding.
Because the intensity of their rhythmic assault can become tiring, We Were Promised Jetpacks smartly break things up with songs such as the spacey, drumless instrumental interlude "A Half-Built House" and the hushed, finger-picked album closer "An Almighty Thud" (though some of the more introspective tracks, like "This Is My House, This Is My Home", are a little too soppily "Grey's Anatomy"-ready). But their best songs are still the barnburners.
While they can teeter on the verge of being too angsty or overindulgent-- a fault not aided by Thompson's penchant for repeating one dramatic line over and over again-- We Were Promised Jetpacks were built for speed. And thanks to the taut grooves of a tight rhythm section, they sound better the faster they play. They don't have the lyrical complexity of the bands that they will be compared to (from a young U2 to the aforementioned Frightened Rabbit), but they do have the energy and that's a promising place to start.
Review by Rebecca Raber
Rate 6.7/10
Track List:
01. It's Thunder And It's Lightning (04:49)
02. Ships With Holes Will sink (03:22)
03. Roll Up Your Sleeves (04:17)
04. Conductor (05:29)
05. A Half Built House (02:42)
06. This Is My House, This Is My Home (03:17)
07. Quiet Little Voices (04:21)
08. Moving Clocks Run Slow (04:56)
09. Short Bursts (04:41)
10. Keeping Warm (08:13)
11. An Almighty Thud (03:35)
Summary:
Country: Scotland
Genre: Indie Rock
Media Report:
Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~774-1000 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
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