Jet
“*Drinks piss*” – A monkey
“Wow, I’ve never heard a band that sounds like this before!” – Someone who’s never listened to any music ever
Albums Reviewed:
Jet are Australian and Pitchfork hates them because they’re the least original rock band in the history of time but I like them because they’re fun and in spite of the fact that they’re the least original rock band in the history of time. Do you like AC/DC and Oasis? Congratulations! So do Jet.
Lineup! From left to right in your photo are guitarist Cam Muncey, lead singer/guitarist Nic Cester, bassist Mark Wilson, and drummer Chris Cester, Nic’s brother. Nic’s voice is better than Geddy Lee’s.
And, onto the reviews!
Get Born (2003)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Cold Hard Bitch”
Notwithstanding the rating up there (trust me, that’s a HIGH 7), if
we’re to break free of the current modern rock radio rap-rock nu-metal crap
bullshit straitjacket we’re currently in, more bands need to sound like
this. It’d be nice if they display a little more originality than these four nice boys (meaning, oh, some originality…), but for now I’ll take what I can get, and continue
saying that more bands need to
sound like this. Rock and roll music is not meant to be a slow,
plodding, rap-tinged fiesta of morose, angsty crap. Rock and roll music needs not only to rock,
but to roll as well, and I’ll take this band over most of what’s on rock radio
nowadays in a heartbeat, completely unoriginal and cliché-ridden
though they may be.
Anyway, now that I’ve gotten my concluding paragraph out of the way early (nice one, Brad…), Jet are a foursome from Australia featuring the picture-perfect rock voice of one Nic Cester, three other guys, and the (correct) belief that rock and roll was better thirty years ago than it is now. Thus, they basically go about shamelessly ripping off their predecessors/betters (and Oasis, too) for 50 minutes, creating a nice mix of foot-stompin’ classic rockers and sugary yet tasteful ballads. Originality? As I’ve said a few times by now, no. Good lord no. But good songs? Yup! Nothing GREAT, though. I’d probably say half this record is very good, half is pretty good, and only one song is giant shitstain. For the time we live in, that’s a pretty good ratio! Starts off quite well, too. “Last Chance” is only like a minute and a half long, so fork it, but then, hey! “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” is derivative of about 100 other things I’ve heard before, and sometimes those “1, 2, 3, take your hand and come with me…” vocal interlude things make me cringe a little bit, but it’s catchy and fun and bouncy and all sorts of things that the CURRENT definition of “modern rock” is not. It may be cliched, yeah, and so may be the song that follows, “Rollover DJ” (“A pill-poppin’ jukebox is all that you are!” Ech, though I DO like the line “your supersonic beats messin’ up my Keds” or whatever it is), but there needs to be a place for this kind of old school rock and roll today, if only to show the little kiddies listening to the radio what good music used to sound like before Fred Durst fucked everything up. And if a band has to turn into a Rolling Stones/AC/DC/Paul McCartney/Oasis (which one doesn’t belong?) cover band to do this, then so be it.
On the whole, Jet is more successful on the rockers than the ballads here, and I wish the rocker to ballad ratio was more rocker-heavy than the 7/6 one we have, because the ballad clumpage at the end of the album often begins to annoy me, but every ballad here is at least good, even if there are too many. “Look What You’ve Done,” which imitates Oasis’ best stuff perfectly and then goes into full-on solo Paul McCartney mode during a few sections, is definitely the most successful, but the Sticky Fingers-era Rolling Stones tribute “Move On” and the clever, self-deprecating “Radio Song” (“Take a look at what I took, a page out of everybody’s book” is damn right, but at least the band admits it), as well as the closing “Timothy” are nice, too. “Come Around Again,” though, despite it’s neat, early-70’s faux Goats Head Soup keyboard tone, is Just Another Ballad, and “Lazy Gun” turns into annoying mediocre-Oasis-by-the-numbers after starting out as a groovy, not-quite-like-anything-else-on-the-record slow thumper thing, and that, my friends, is stupid.
Like I said, the rockers here are more successful, and I think that’s where the band’s best hopes lie, but they too start to lose their freshness as the album goes along (with the exception of my favorite here, “Cold Hard Bitch,” i.e. The Best AC/DC Song Not By AC/DC I’ve Ever Heard). “Get What You Need” is good stuff, and the backing vocals are total Keith Richards, but “Get Me Out of Here,” outside of its bitchin’ boogie piano part, is Just Another Rocker, and “Take it Or Leave it” makes it seem to me like the band just ran out of material, because it just takes the riff from “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?”, speeds it up, and has Nic Cester go “YEAH!” over it. It’s over in two minutes. It doesn’t have a chorus. Why does it exist? I dunno. It probably shouldn’t.
This is a band with serious potential, but they need to change a few things. They have fantastic influences (except maybe for Oasis, but at their best, Oasis has written some superb ballads in the “Look What You’ve Done” mold, like “Don’t Look Back in Anger” or something), and they’re obviously very good at aping them, but I think they need to establish more of an identity of their own. I welcome the addition of a band such as this into the modern rock arena, but I’d love for them to escape this kind of slavish imitation and instead meld these influences into something unique, sort of like the White Stripes. Heck, since these guys have, you know, a bassist and a competent drummer, they’ve already got a headstart on those two annoying pale people! Just find your identity, boys, and cut out some of the ballads. They get tiresome! You’re very nice balladeers, but we don’t need six of them per album. So, here’s your checklist: Cut the ballads back to maybe 3 or 4 a record, write a few more convincing rockers (or at least enough so that you don’t have to rewrite your own songs from the same album), and establish an identity of your own free of the shackles of hero-worship. Now GO! And make more good rock and roll music!
Pedro Andino (pedroandino@msn.com) writes:
we need some more rock bands
like this instead of this rap shit. we need more guitars and no
distortion. we need solos more than none at all. get born is good!. speaking of
that john cena is the number one guy for me! yep! white men can rap!
cena is so sexy! the girls are so in love with the man more than tired ol' JBL
and his whiny I am a god attitude! ugh! and also what do you think of the
movies of 2005? awnsers!: we had ray with jaime foxx then we had the exorcisim
of emily rose then we had 4 brothers! a violent film with marky mark oops mark
whalberg. dukes of hazzard with sexy jessica simpson.
Shine On (2006)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “King’s
Horses”
I’d first like to retroactively make it seem like I know more about music than I do to counteract the fact that I’m giving the least original band on the planet two consecutive 7’s. In my review of Jet’s first album I said something about “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” reminding me of like100 different songs but not getting specific. That was stupid. It’s “Lust for Life.” It’s the same damn song. I realized this like a week after I posted the review. So that’s that. Commence actual review.
Jet’s back! And they’re somehow less original than on Get Born! I for one didn’t think it was possible, but Jet have somehow managed to make that album seem original and forward-thinking by comparison, even though “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” was written thirty-something years ago by Iggy Pop, “Cold Hard Bitch” is actually by AC/DC, and “Look What You’ve Done” is actually by Oasis. I hereby second the Pitchfork review of this album, in which they posted a Youtube video of a chimp drinking his own urine in lieu of actually writing anything, and hereby call Jet unoriginal talentless hacks who suck at writing music and are probably anti-American, too, since they’re Australian and all.
Except no. Jet may be nothing more than an AC/DC/Rolling Stones/Paul McCartney/Oasis tribute band (and if you hate them you probably think they’re absolutely insipid), but, dammit, they’re a good AC/DC/Rolling Stones/Paul McCartney/Oasis tribute band. First of all, Nic Cester’s voice is phenomenal and would have fit perfectly fronting any of the faceless and unoriginal yet dumbly fun mid-seventies hard rock bands Jet are obviously today’s answer to. Second, the production on this record is superb, as all sorts of cool guitar tones and crap (that you heard for the first time 35-40 years ago) are employed to excellent effect and support some honest-to-goodness pretty damn good riffs. If you don’t mind the fact that they sound like they’re covering their favorite bands all the time and every cowbell, handclap, harmony vocal, keyboard touch, etc. is designed for maximum “make this sound exactly like the early-mid seventies” effect, then you’re in for a decent time. If you like bands to write stuff you haven’t heard 100 times, maybe you should find someone else.
Musically,
the band’s gotten a little more
diverse, and while this just means that they’re blatantly ripping off/imitating
(depending on whether you like them or not) more bands than before, it’s still
nice to see. The rockers are the rockers
are the rockers and they’re fine, but I don’t find them any better than what we
saw on Get Born, and probably a
little worse. There’s no perfect AC/DC
tribute song like “Cold Hard Bitch,” for instance, and some of them seem a
little rote and “we need a fast yelling one now”-ish (“That’s All Lies,” “Rip
it Up,” etc.). It’s been commented
elsewhere that “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is” is a little too close in tone to “Are You Gonna Be
My Girl?”, and I’m gonna second that statement, though the same reviewer’s
disparaging remarks about the cowbell should be stricken from the record (who
doesn’t like a nice cowbell?). “
The ballads and midtempo sort-of-ballads are usually pretty smooth and do have some “diversity” (like the one that sounds like a tribute to the Beatles circa-1967, only minus the LSD, “Shiny Magazine.” By the way, this song rules), so you can strike my comment in the last review about wishing the band did more rockers than ballads, since without the ballads this record drops all the way down to a 6, and no one wants these guys falling into Arctic Monkeys territory. You can also probably strike my earlier comment about diversity, since I was just thinking of “Shiny Magazine” when I typed it and didn’t consider the fact that every single other slow song sounds like Oasis, only minus the gargantuan egomania. If Nic Cester sounds nice and rockin’ and gruffly on the rockers, on the ballads he doesn’t just sound like Liam Gallagher, he is Liam Gallagher. Take “Bring it on Back,” for example, or maybe the title track. I actually like both of these songs a lot, and am somewhat shocked that the band has been able to incorporate generic black female backup singers into the latter without fucking the song up (hell, they even improve it). I appreciate the subtle touches, like that echoey guitar solo thing and barely-there strings in the latter and the spacey backup vocals and little slide guitar thingy entrances in “Bring it on Back” (they may be lyrically retarded and have no originality whatsoever, but you know what? This band knows how to make neat little production touches that make you think “Hey! That probably sounded badass in 1972!”), but the fact remains that if you stuck the drunk asshole Gallagher brother at the microphone I don’t know how many people would notice. This even applies to my favorite track, the pretty little shuffly “King’s Horses.” It’s so tastefully arranged and well-produced, but that’s actually that fucking moron singer from Oasis singing, isn’t it? Only when did he sound that subtle?
I should also mention that songs on this album are given such not-at-all-cliched titles as “Bring it on Back,” “Hey Kids,” “Shine On,” “Come On Come On,” “Stand Up,” “Rip it Up” (those last four are right in a row, by the way), and “All You Have to Do.” I’ve briefly alluded to it, but lyrically these guys are a step above pre-school finger painting, and it sometimes seems like they fed a whole bunch of random classic rock songs into a computer program to come up with some of the couplets. Nic Cester also manages to yell “Yeah!” or “Hey!” roughly 500 times on the album. This is not a record for deep thinkers, or at least for those who expect their musical heroes to be deep thinkers. This is just a record by four grimy-looking Australian guys who dig the Beatles, Rolling Stones, AC/DC, and Oasis and are really good at aping their heroes. That’s it. Personally I dig it, or at least I dig it enough not to post a video of a chimp drinking its own piss.