In Stores Now: These Four Walls by We Were Promised Jetpacks

Illustration by Louis Wain from Henry Drummond's The Monkey Who Would Not Kill, 1910

I was wary of We Were Promised Jetpacks at first. Something about this band from Edinburgh, Scotland smacked of "youth culture" in a way that frightened me as a guy over thirty. Their band name and image recalls emo-punk groups like Taking Back Sunday, My Chemical Romance, or The Academy Is... There was a time when I would have written a band off for such associations, even though they may be unintentional or existing solely in my own head, but I decided to give We Were Promised Jetpacks' debut album These Four Walls a try anyway.

The most promising thing about the album to me was its connection to Frightened Rabbit, a band that I love. Some people say that too much is made of the connection between the two Scottish bands - "You're just comparing them because their vocalists both have heavy Scottish accents" - but I think the comparison is justified. Like Frightened Rabbit (a band who they have opened for on tour multiple times), We Were Promised Jetpacks trade in unironic sentimental pop and arrangements that focus on dynamics, swells, and big crescendos.

The best songs on These Four Walls, like the album opener "It's Thunder and It's Lightening" and "This Is My House, This Is My Home", follow the Frightened Rabbit template effectively without sounding like rip-offs. Slower numbers like "Conductor" and the eight-minute epic "Keeping Warm" show how this dynamic can be stretched out without losing its impact, and a few oddities like the acoustic closer "An Almighty Thud" and the instrumental "A Half Built House" show that the band isn't 100% wedded to a single sound. The latter song also proves that there is likely no end to bands cribbing from the Conet Project as well - I thought for a while that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot had put an end to that.

The reason that These Four Walls rises above being a second-rate Frightened Rabbit imitation is that the sonics the band uses are different enough to give We Were Promised Jetpacks' songs an identity of their own. They don't use the same Telecaster-led pocket symphony that Frightened Rabbit opts for - their preferred sound is simpler and grittier and also somehow more spacious. The chiming guitars, bell sounds, and drumming style bear a resemblance to the post-rock sounds that were popularized a few years ago by Godspeed You Black Emperor and Explosions in the Sky.

The best aspects of These Four Walls can all be found on the album's second track, "Ships With Holes Will Sink". Vocalist Adam Thompson's thick accent is clear and unadorned as the song opens, but the band builds up to a big, big guitar sound by the middle of the first verse. Several different guitar parts are layered nicely, dropping away and coming back to create a nice ebb and flow as the propulsive drumming drives the song along. This song would probably be great in a live setting, and I may get a chance to hear it that way soon. We Were Promised Jetpacks are touring the US in the late summer with Frightened Rabbit and the Twilight Sad (another similar Scottish band that I've been meaning to investigate). A show like that might be too much sentimental Scottish pop for the average person, but I haven't come close to getting my fill yet.

"Ships With Holes Will Sink" by We Were Promised Jetpacks