Mystery Jets - keeping itsimple

Thu 12th Apr, 2007 in Features

There’s something going on in Ol’ Blighty. While hoary rock behemoths like Oasis and pretenders Kasabian lumber on, and Arctic Monkeys kick up a storm, oddball pop music is making a comeback. Led by the likes of Guillemots and Mystery Jets, they’re bringing music with an obtuse pop sensibility back into the limelight.

On their debut album, Making Dens, Mystery Jets showcase exactly why they were so highly touted throughout 2006 – not because of any hype surrounding frontman Blaine Harrison being in the band with his pa, multi-instrumentalist Henry Harrison, but because theirs is a band who know their way almost instinctually around a good tune. It’s something that came from long practice and hard work; Blaine estimates that they played the songs on the album some 300 or so times before recording them.

It’s not something that they’re repeating for their second album, which is where he is headed towards the minute this interview finishes – Mystery Jets are in the studio crafting their follow-up release. “I’m pretty excited really,” he enthuses. “It’s going to plan – we set out to write 30 songs and then choose the best 10. For the first album we found that we had a set that we’d been touring for almost two years and that really was the album – we didn’t have any choice and those were the songs that we’d played live and those were the songs that we felt we had in us. For this second record we’ve had more time to grow and more time to actually put the lyrics together.”

As indicated, the making of their second record and the impetus behind its creation is going to lead to very different feel. “We really tried to look at is as a new thing, and everything was written in about six to seven months.”

Ah, the classic – œlifetime to write your debut, six months to write your second’ adage.

“I’m looking to be quite surprised by it – a lot of the songs we haven’t even thought about performing live, so I think it will be quite an interesting album to replicate on stage, Blaine continues. “It’s quite an electronic album actually, because our producer Errol Alkan comes from dance music and he’s got a lot of experience with things like remixes – he’s done Justice, and Death From Above, and those guys. He’s got a lot of experience using drum machines and keyboards and that’s something we’ve always been interested in getting into but we’ve never particularly had the right tools to do it, really.”

It sounds like it’s going to be completely different to _Making Dens_…something that could be a good thing, but might also not work – the band’s debut is a striking first-up effort, and something that most certainly bodes well for the future, but obviously it was something that they don’t want to completely replicate the second time around.

“I hope it’s not too different,” he assures, “because I don’t want people to feel like they hear the first record and then they hear the second and it’s a completely different band; I think to avoid confusing people it’s really important that we still put as much effort into the lyrics and into all the songs as we did [on Making Dens] even though the atmospherics in the songs might have changed. I’ve always believed that a good song should sound good on acoustic guitar as well as with a very big fucking philharmonic orchestra behind you as well.”

That’s certainly part of the beauty of Making Dens – you can hear how simple it might have been, but Mystery Jets know exactly when to amp it up and when to tone it down. This is a band with a great level of songcraft skill, and their debut is a rich start to what promises to be a beautiful career.

Mystery Jets’ Making Dens is out now.