After a year of hype, Australian rockers Jet have finally landed with their debut album, Get Born. Unfortunately, musically speaking, Born is more of a turboprop than a Concorde.
Britain’s easily excitable music press had its collective knickers in a knot over Jet from the get-go, what with the T. Rex-referencing title of the band’s first EP, Dirty Sweet, and its no-pretenses wardrobe (black, denim, one guy in a police cap). “Jet are rock stars!” the NME panted, as if rock ‘n’ roll posing was the same thing as rock ‘n’ roll itself.
Somewhere, somehow, there’s more to current rock than a warmed-over take on the 1970s — but Get Born isn’t it. It is, however, the kind of album that results when four young Aussies amalgamate almost the whole of ’70s rock into 13 extremely derivative tracks.
The catchy “Rollover DJ” insults DJs for “playing other people’s songs,” but what about rock bands that rip off other people’s songs? If it’s played on classic rock radio, chances are there are signs of it on Get Born: the Stones, Bowie, the Beatles (and their corollary, the Kinks-Oasis-Rod Stewart axis), rough vocals, country rock, Elton John and AC/DC. Indeed, I kept expecting Bon Scott to burst out halfway through songs exclaiming “Done dirt cheap!” And the tracklisting verges on cock-rock caricature, with sensitive ballads followed by songs like “Cold Hard Bitch.”
Born is bound together with competent amounts of harmony, guitars, piano ballads and old-fashioned rock ethic, but it’s not deep enough to be truly profound, and not quite spirited enough to be consistently fun.
At least the production is good. The album sounds warm, immediate and genuine, as if it were recorded by a live band, not pieced together by some Pro Tools-addicted studio rat. There are a few good tunes, too: “Take It or Leave It” is punch-packing full-on rock, and the slow “Radio Song” displays the the harmony-happy heart beneath the swagger.
Jet’s influences aren’t all as cool as the band would have you believe, though: The percussion kicking off “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” sounds scarily like the intro to “Walk Like an Egyptian,” the boring “Move On” would make a great addition to Kid Rock’s repertoire, and at least two songs are content to kick it into Bachman-Turner Overdrive. This is appropriate, since much of the time it sounds like Jet is just takin’ care of business.
Granted, not many people in retro-revival rock look like they’re enjoying themselves as much as, say, operatic unitard-wearing Englishmen The Darkness, but still! Where’s the excitement? Jet seems to take itself just a little too seriously. Lead singer Nic Cester proudly sports a “Disco Sucks” T-shirt, as if he and his band showed up terribly late to Disco Demolition Night but still want to take an axe to someone’s Donna Summer collection. Maybe I’m just really out of the loop here, but wasn’t this battle fought 25 years ago? And isn’t this sort of flimsy, too-cool guitar-slinger business just the kind of thing that helped drive people to those leisure-suited lighted dance floors in the first place?
It’s difficult to fight the idea that Jet would be nowhere but on the next plane back to Oz if a ’70s musical revival weren’t already in full swing. Get Born may be the sort of back-to-basics CD major labels don’t release too often these days, but it is nothing that hasn’t been heard before — last month, or in 1978.
Perhaps some music fans have become so blinded by the supposed return of rock that they tolerate and even praise records with no trace of originality. Get Born is fair enough, but what is its point if you can just as easily listen to the far superior albums that much-too-blatantly influenced it? Well? C
