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The Southern Hemisphere seems to
be delivering a steady stream of guitar bands playing
bubblegum rock, with never a minor chord to be heard.
Most of the albums follow a similar format of a few
distorted power chord rock songs influenced by The Rolling Stones, accompanied by a handful of
ballads, with a piano thrown in for good measure. It's
a music scene, and in the case of Australian outfit Jet,
it's a Ford Mustang in a sea of Mondeos.
With any band coming out of
Australia there are going to be immediate comparisons
with The Vines. To be fair, there is a
similarity, but then I would be more surprised if
there was not. Get Born is not the most complicated
album musically; in fact, any guitar player with a hint
of talent could learn to play this album cover to
cover in a matter of hours. This lukewarm fact does
not make this album bad - on the contrary, it's damn
good.
Its simplicity is its biggest
asset. The songs are, on the whole, short. There is no
time for unwanted choruses and solos. The catchy
guitars are reminiscent of many of the greats. On
opening track Last Dance, the riff is straight from
AC/DC's Highway To Hell.
The recent single, Are You Gonna
Be My Girl has hints of Iggy Pop, The Sex
Pistols and The Rolling Stones. Surprisingly
though, Radio Song and Come Around Again wouldn't
sound out of place on a Stereophonics album.
One highlight is the subtle country twang that is
added to Move On, which makes an otherwise ordinary
ballad a lot more than the sum of its parts.
Rollover DJ has a more funky
bite to it, and perhaps the best lyric on the album,
in reference to any DJ: "Well I know that you think
you're a star/A pill-popping jukebox is all that you
are."
Perhaps the best track on the
album, Cold Hard Bitch has all the edginess, vitality
and presence that a song of this nature should have.
It slowly builds to the point where the singer screams
and then enters a riff that will go down a storm in
any venue it is played live this winter.
The T-Rex laced Lazy Gun comes
across as something of an experiment in relation to
the other songs. This is a nice addition, especially
as it appears late on in the album, by which time you
feel the band have just about exhausted their back
catalogue. This is given further evidence by the
presence of Timothy, a dire dirge that shouldn't be on
the album. Thankfully this is really the only weak spot in what is
otherwise a very competent, catchy and youthful
album.
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