The Mystery Jets

Blaine Harrison
William Rees
Kai Fish
Kapil Trivedi
Henry Harrison

Mystery Jets, hailing from Twickenham’s Eel Pie Island, are a band that have been around for a good few years and yet seem to be understated. They have released two albums, Making Dens and Twenty One, and 10 singles but are still sitting somewhat uncomfortably below the nation’s knowledge. I implore you to answer me this; why?

The sensitive and evocative lyrics instantly beseech you, the impressionable listener, to be sucked into the sometimes bleak and sometimes tragic picture which the Jets are painting. Each song is full of thought provoking verses and endearing choruses, often sung from a plaintively youthful perspective.

There is not a single track on either of the albums that I would skip through. And trust me, that’s incredibly rare considering how teenagely dismissive and impatient I am. I’ve picked out a few songs that particularly pique my interest, but to say that they are my favourites would be unfair to the other tracks.

Umbrellahead, from second album Twenty One and produced by none other than Erol Alkan, is a gentle and chilling call for help from a boy that doesn’t want to grow old. The delicate paper-thin childhood memories dance their way through the air to your ears and tell the melancholy tale of this minor’s distress at the thought of his ‘skin folding’. Once the track has finished, you find yourself wishing for a time when you too wanted to climb trees, believed in Father Christmas and went to sleep a little bit nervous of the monster under your bed.

Without the help of Blaine Harrison’s saliently poignant voice, these lyrics would have no where near as much impact. The calls of this young man’s vocals pitter-patter their way through you and entreat you to be enveloped in the nostalgia of the lyrics. Once the song has ended, the gap between the next one on the album leaves the air around you heavy with the promise of more of his penetrating tones, and leaves your once busy and bustling head empty with nothing more than Blaine’s lyrical S.O.S ringing through your thoughts.

Two Doors Down and Young Love are both lustfully upbeat. They are well and truly the ‘pop’ in this band’s repertoire of indie pop. However, one of the things that I adore most about Mystery Jets is that you can go from wanting to fling yourself round the room, dancing like a nutter, to wanting to stand very still, doing that thing when all your other senses shut up for a bit and you hear everything that’s in a song.

Twenty One does exactly that. The song comprises of nothing more than a piano and Blaine’s vocals, but its beauty lies in its simplicity. The hidden track on the album of the same name, Twenty One is, as you can imagine from its title, a coming of age song. The ‘boy’ that the lyrics are centred around has grown up and cut all his ties with his former existence. Now he’s reached ‘twenty three’, he thinks he’s seen it all and still can’t find his place in the world; he’s lost. This is a familiar story of every cocksure pre-adult lad that thinks he can take the world by storm, a story that, told by anyone else, would be old news and boring. But, of course, Mystery Jets have stripped the tale of gimmicks like distortion and flashy drum rolls, and left behind fragile emotion that you can’t help but devote undivided attention to, for fear that if you don’t, it will slip away.

They’re not all that emo though. There are massive amounts of fun in Alas Agnes and MJ that tell the story of unrequited love for a transvestite and incest respectively. Of course.

I’ve seen these boys live a number of times, but an occasion that really stands out is at last year’s Underage Festival. They put on a fantastic set and I wandered off to go and watch Ladyhawke feeling a little bit stunned. Part-way through her performance, I decided to leave my friends (mental) and go and have a look at what Patrick Wolf was doing on one of the other stages. So I’m standing there on my Jack Jones, a little bit disturbed by just how weird Patrick Wolf is, and who should I see out of the corner of my eye but Mystery Jets drummer, Kapil Trivedi! After staring in shock for a bit, I got myself together and went and said hello. (When I say ‘said’, I mean awkwardly shouted down his ear because Pat had whacked the distortion up to insane.) At the end of the conversation, I held my hand out for a handshake. Kapil, being the wonderful person he is, frowned and held his arms out for a hug. Mind. Blown. (Retrospectively, I see that this doesn’t actually have masses to do with the review. Oh well.)

Should this band be given a visual representation, I would give it a firework. The colourful lyrics explode with the force of tender vocals and leave you utterly amazed at the wonders of something so simple and no matter how hard you try to explain it, you can never quite do it justice.

So thank you Blaine, William, Kai, Kapil and Henry, for such elegant music that has been the soundtrack of my teenage years. With so many middle-class indie boy bands cluttering up the music scene at the moment, it would be both detrimental to your ears, review-reader, and your health not to sit up and take note of this group. So go on, get your shoes on, walk down to HMV, buy these albums and place your bets on the Mystery Jets.

By Rosie