We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls reviews
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| Avclub |
 Like their friends in The Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit, the members of the Scot-rock act We Were Promised Jetpacks excel at freezing moments. The band’s debut album, These Four Walls, even opens with a precise image—“Right foot followed by your left foot / got to get you home by curfew”—that captures the feeling of stumbling home drunk in the dark of night. The song, “It’s Thunder And It’s Lightning,” finds frontman Adam Thompson moving from a near-mumble to a howl, as his mates shift from a thick rumble of rapidly strummed guitars to a torrent of distortion and hammering percussion. Yet throughout, the lyrics remain dreamy and impressionistic, built on just-so phrases that gain in impact as Thompson repeats them with mounting anxiety. We Were Promised Jetpacks holds to this formula on aggressive rock songs like “Short Bursts,” “Quiet Little Voices,” and “Roll Up Your Sleeves,” all of which have more in common with the howling emotion and cavernous guitar sound of Big Country than the bright melancholy of Belle And Sebastian or the jagged danceability of Franz Ferdinand. And yet We Were Promised Jetpacks has some further kinship with those other bands, beyond nationality. These Four Walls is like a 50-minute, 11-song tour through the Scottish scene’s past, present, and future, emphasizing how much of the country’s best pop music has been concerned with transporting listeners to specific places, so we can all linger there together....full text |
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| Prefixmag |
| Add the Glaswegian four-piece We Were Promised Jetpacks (wicked band name by the way) to the current craze for the thick Scottish brogue (see The Twilight Sad, Frightened Rabbit, Glasvegas). Jetpacks formed in Edinburgh in 2003, where they won over the ears of their classmates at a high school battle of the bands competition. Their sound recalls some of the cacophony of Mogwai but doesn't utilize too many fancy guitar effects or song structures. The pummeling thrum of The Twilight Sad or the wistful yearning of Frightened Rabbit is brought to mind again on debut These Four Walls. The quartet is now creating torrential sheets of rock for FatCat Records. Before even releasing a single, Jetpacks received some buzz from several radio stations after a three-track demo was disseminated. Adam Thompson (guitar/vocals) is the lead songwriter, and Michael Palmer (guitar), Sean Smith (bass), and Darren Lackie (drums) fill the rest of the group....full text |
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| Musicomh |
There's something undeniably "Scottish" about We Were Promised Jetpacks. Weak and intangible opening gambit, right? Yet, as with their country brethren, Glasvegas, Frightened Rabbit and The Twilight Sad, there's the sense in which stooping to stereotypes needn't be viewed with such distaste.
Being proud of your roots is once again de rigueur north of the border, and that is surely no bad thing - just think of the British bands that have used their sense of identity to fortify classic albums in the past. True to the stereotype, These Four Walls is, at times, an unflinching surge of Scottish zeal, post-breakup grit and blue-bloodied vehemence. At others, the album tentatively speaks from within its shell, exposing the type of vulnerability that can only stem from wearing a heart so visibly and so openly.
There's nothing particularly tentative about the album's bristling opening track, It's Thunder And Lightning. Appropriately titled, it isn't long before its post-punk, Bloc Party-esque pretensions spike up into a full-blown bellow: "Your body was black and blue! / your body was black and blue!" The track soon simmers down into sarcasm: "I have to say goodnight / I'm leaving before you're punching out my lights." The two themes: anger and a defiant sort of sarcasm become a mini-feature of the the album, with the band's lead singer, Adam Thompson, being adept at delivering both....full text |
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