Jet – Get Born

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.