Review Summary: Mystery Jets have come together to release their most cohesive album yet.
There comes a time in some bands lives when they realize their dreams of making it huge probably won’t come into vision. The ambitious hopes of worldwide arena tours & retiring as legends are a long gone thought left to sit in the back of their heads, as the band goes more and more years sitting in the same idle position they were 5 years before, and 5 years before that. When the hype of being “the next big thing” dies down there isn’t much more of the spotlight to look forward to. As bands like Arctic Monkeys & Kasabian are selling huge numbers of albums over the seas, bands like Mystery Jets are left to make music for their consistently loyal fan base – This isn’t always a bad thing.
Curve Of The Earth is the sextets 6th album as group, ironically adding a seventh member ‘Jack Flanagan’ to take the roll of second bass player. With 7 people working on an album you expect a level of depth and complication to come with it, which is really where Mystery Jets succeed on this record. With heavy layering throughout the entire thing, it helps to carry songs like ‘Bubblegum’ to heights it would have struggled to reach; with occasional ambient sounds being mixed and pieced creatively with theatric guitars, and drumming you wouldn’t find misplaced in any Indie Rock song, but unlike any other “Indie Rock song” Bubblegum sounds special. Also with the addition of this new member, Mystery Jets are able to build songs how they have never before. On COTE every single song seems to have a cohesive direction, built up by the each of the band-members strengths, giving off the feeling that every song has been created in such an obsessive, yet comforting way. This sound allows the listener to feel more content with each song on the album and less of an “I wish the song went this way” feeling which you may find in other Mystery Jets albums.
Consistency isn’t something you’d generally expect in this sort of album now a days. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ll always go into listening with expectations that there will be a few duds that I’ll be skipping within a few listens. In this album it feels like every song has been made to complement each other, which allows for every song to sound fresh and new without any need to skip. It sounds like a collection of songs built for each other and not a group of 9 generic Indie Rock songs. For example; ‘1985’ is sort of the ballad-esque ‘sad song’ on the album, but it has a beautiful sense of nostalgia and is probably the strongest showing of the Jets’ lyricism on this album. It’s a tale of lost love and returning to your youth to relive memories - carried by dramatic instrumentation, it creates a play-like feel in the best of ways. But then, directly next to this on the album with no trouble of sound is ‘Blood Red Balloon’, which is littered with inspirations from The Beatles, semi-distorted vocals and abstract clatters. Still, the song builds up with haunting theatrics and beauty that is hard to find with such creativity.
Curve Of The Earth isn’t going to go down as a classic, but It shouldn’t be slept on. This is the sound of a band that has come to terms with their level of success and they are celebrating it in the best of ways. Despite the fact that every song comes together in a dramatic and (as stated many times) theatric way, there is no part of this album that sounds like a band taking itself too seriously. At the end of the day, the Mystery Jets have made a fun, original album that will stand very strongly in their discography at the end of their careers.
