We Were Promised Jetpacks – These Four Walls
For the longest time I used to think people lost their accent when they sang through no fault of their own. I thought singing stretched your vocal chords to the point of making your style of speech virtually unrecognisable. Then I heard The View. Then I heard Marmaduke Duke. Then I heard We Were Promised Jetpacks. Then that theory went flying out of the window.
We Were Promised Jetpacks are from Glasgow and they aren’t going to let you forget it. Their name manages to be simultaneously awesome and unpretentious, which is no mean feat. It also succeeds in not revealing anything about the band. Odd band names usually leave you with expectations of minimalistic, hand-clappy ‘indie’ music and while WWPJ are certainly indie (Fat Cat is not a major record label) they are not typically minimalistic in the least.
And with a track titled ‘It’s Thunder and it’s Lightening’ you should never have expected them to be. The song appears to be a belatedly drunken apology as the protagonist shakes himself out of a post-binge haze only to be faced with the confronting image of a person whose body is black and blue. The identity of the culprit is questionable, but it’s very easy to put the blame on the desolate, inebriated singer. Too easy.
‘Roll up your sleeves’ advises us to do so because ‘we’re heading for winter’ and ‘the nights will get colder.’ The logic is a bit flawed, no? It would, however, explain why the tenth track is called ‘Keeping Warm.’ The songs sound nothing alike. The former has a thinner guitar strung over the vocals while the latter is more lush in its almost complete instrumentalism.
WWPJ don’t scrimp on lyrics. ‘Conductor’ and ‘An Almighty Thud’ are clever little pieces of prose. ‘Conductor’ has an especially fantastic finale wherein it makes you stand with the instrumentalists while the singer is a little distance away, his voice catching in the breeze and floating towards you. Soon he starts walking in your direction and as drums shadow his footsteps, the track reaches its atmospheric conclusion.
I wonder about ‘A Half-Built House.’ A couple of months ago I came across a track on ‘Arrivals’ by worriedaboutsatan (the first album I reviewed on this site) which was nothing but an excessively long numerical thread. ‘A Half-Built House’ is much the same. Is this some sort of musical trend that only those in-the-know… know?
Fun fact about ‘Moving Clocks Run Slow’ – it was very nearly the band’s name before they realised ‘Jetpacks’ is a cooler abbreviation than ‘Clocks.’ Fun fact about We Were Promised Jetpacks – they’re still in university. Parents, buy this album for your kids and tell them to stay in school. Kids, listen to this album non-stop and tell your parents what good role models they are. People-in-general, this is an easy album to like. It’s not mind-bogglingly brilliant, but it’s not something you’ll regret listening to and it does give you a simultaneously awesome yet unpretentious band name to add your collection.
