Moving Clocks Run Slow – We Were Promised Jetpacks
I’ve still got a set of “best of the aughts” posts coming up. I’ll try to get those out before the end of January. In the meantime, though, I’ve got some bits and pieces to clean up of the music I enjoyed last year but couldn’t quite find a spot for on my lists and never got around to talking about otherwise.
First is We Were Promised Jetpacks, who dwell quite nicely in the space carved out by fellow Scottish bands like Frightened Rabbit, Glasvegas, and The Twilight Sad.
It’s a bit more aggressively prog-rock than those folks, but you get the general idea: big sweeping movements, guitar textures that ventures toward mid-90s space rock (think Hum), but with a super-aggressive percussion. If space rock is the sound of white noise which is your only company as you drift through the deep black in between the stars, then this is the sound of crashing back through the atmosphere.
The record is called These Four Walls, and most of the songs are well worth it. The only two real missteps are the efforts to change the pace. “A Half Built House” and “An Almighty Thud” unfortunately both sound pretty much like their titles: incomplete and dull. I don’t oppose the idea of trying to balance the thunder and lightning of the other tracks with something else. I just think these particular efforts didn’t really make the cut. A much more successful effort to offer some contrast can be found in “Conductor” which shows they’ve got a bit of a sweet tooth when it comes to melodies.
Still, virtually everything else is great. In particular, give “It’s Thunder And It’s Lightning,” “Quiet Little Voices,” and the second half of “Keeping Warm” a few listens. But the best song is probably “Moving Clocks Run Slow” (which was one of a couple songs in the running for #40 on my list for last year), which sounds almost like a more beefy and rugged version of that first Clap Your Hands Say Yeah record.