The Musicgoer: We Were Promised Jetpacks' These Four Walls

WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS
These Four Walls
(Fat Cat)
**** (out of 5)

If Belle and Sebastian are all about wry, literate lyrics and Franz Ferdinand are all about stripped-down rhythms, then their fellow Scottish indie rockers in We Were Promised Jetpacks are simply all about the sound: room-filling guitars, soaring vocals, drumming whose precision doesn’t detract at all from its emotional insistence. They’re just a quartet, but on These Four Walls, WWPJ fills the room as if they were Arcade Fire, with the added virtue of writing songs that go easy on the messianic uplift.

Instead, the lyrics are rooted in everyday experience, of being young, walking the Glasgow cement, and flipping up your hoodie against the bitter cold: “It’s Thunder and It’s Lightning” describes a drunken walk home with a girlfriend, while “Roll Up Your Sleeves” and “Keeping Warm” will resonate with anyone who’s lived through the onset of a few Edmonton winters. These Four Walls just gets better as it goes along, with the triple whammy of “Quiet Little Voices,” “Moving Clocks Run Slow,” and “Short Bursts” providing a late-in-the-album shift into hyperdrive. Who needs jetpacks anyway?