Mystery Jets - Making Dens

MYSTERY JETS
Making Dens

Convention means nothing to Mystery Jets. They laugh in the face of conformity. They are, let’s be honest, a bit weird. They live in a part of London called Eel Pie Island, which has a total population of 120, and can only be reached by footbridge or boat. The band’s rhythm guitarist is the 55-year-old father of the lead singer. They bash on pots and pans and create songs with utterly implausible time-changes. How does one describe their music? Prog-indie-pysch-folk-pop? Maybe.

Bearing this in mind, one would half-expect their debut long-player to be self-indulgent, hippy-dippy nonsense, but, thankfully, nothing could be further from the truth. Rather than being weird for weird’s sake, Making Dens is actually an accessible and enjoyable listen. The entire album is summed up by the poppy You Can’t Fool Me Dennis, which sounds like three completely different songs sewn together and boasts equally incongruous and utterly nonsensical lyrics. It really shouldn’t work, but somehow it absolutely does. Elsewhere things are sometimes a touch more uniform. The group chanting of The Boy Who Ran Away sounds not unlike The Futureheads, while Little Bag Of Hair is big, brooding, slow-paced and intelligent indie-rock.

If nothing else, Mystery Jets deserve credit for managing to create something interesting without disappearing up their own backsides. There isn’t anything on this record which could be accused of being overly ostentatious or contrived, and, for a bunch of oddballs, they’ve made something which is surprisingly poppy and fun.