The Scottish are coming. Primarily fueled by the discoveries of Fat Cat Records, anthemic Scottish pop-rock is establishing itself as a legitimate genre, if not a full-blown movement. The newest rave, Edinburgh's We Were Promised Jetpacks, continue to climb the mountain of pounding percussion and throbbing guitars with their debut, These Four Walls.
I like to think that the name We Were Promised Jetpacks is an allusion to disillusionment with the present, a reality much more bleak than the future imagined while growing up on the brink of the past decade's technological boom. What was once a gleeful image rife with childhood fantasies of robots and hovercrafts has actualized itself as a reality of phone taps and Gossip Girl.""
These Four Walls is one of the more complete debuts you'll find. WWPJ understand their role as well as anyone and execute their game plan perfectly. They're a more cinema-ready version of their friends Frightened Rabbit: They use more distortion and don't curse as much.
""It's Thunder and It's Lightning"" starts the album with a roomy guitar before lead singer Adam Thompson ushers in a fury of hammering drums, guitar and glockenspiel. ""Ships With Holes Will Sink"" and the album's first single, ""Quiet Little Voices,"" follow the same formula, each more effective than the last.
Thompson's lyrics could be disappointingly elementary, but they coincide with the band's mastery of maximalist simplicity. Jetpacks stretch both their instruments and their talents as far as they can, pledging to fill up as much space as possible no matter how few resources they have at their disposal.
As such, though, their style is very susceptible to the chocolate Easter bunny situation: a stylish and promising shell around an empty core. But WWPJ are too busy studying Biffy Clyro albums to realize they could ever turn out to sound like the Killers. There are no ill-conceived guitar solos or drum fills, and though he doesn't pull much literary weight, Thompson doesn't dress up his lyrics any more than warranted, either.
Down the road the Scottish accent might overstay its welcome, forcing critics to revoke its free pass on sad-sack emo lyrics. Like most of their neighbors and contemporaries (Frightened Rabbit, the Twilight Sad, Glasvegas, etc.), seemingly all of WWPJ's lyrics revolve around either some fleeting love or gearing up for the bitter cold (whether figurative or literal) of the upcoming winter; but somewhere between the pounding percussion and the thundering guitars, Thomson's affable drawl accumulates enough garishness to sound like it could still bloody your nose outside a futbol stadium, making his heart-on-sleeve earnestness come off more like genuine concern and fury than attention-starved howling.
The minor hiccups on These Four Walls are really just points at which Jetpacks fail to capture attention. Without sounding like a crutch, WWPJ's instrumentation is still a bit of a one-trick pony. They're at their best when they let the throttle drop to the floor and let sonic intricacies and complex storylines fall by the wayside. Maybe they're poor musicians, maybe they're careless, but more likely they're just too anxious to release these outbursts to think about incorporating excessive elements. After all, they never asked for those sorts of complications. All they ever wanted were jetpacks. And on an album so fully realized, that's refreshing enough.
