It’s been a fair old while since Mystery Jets loomed large on the music radar, but their pinging again now in the run up to the release of their 6th studio album, Curve Of The Earth. While their last two outings, Seratonin (2010) and Radlands (2012), didn’t quite capture the soul as much as blowup album, Twenty One (2008), there’s still a fair amount of favour for the band and we’ll be looking forward to getting a full listen to their new material.
Release date
Curve Of The Earth will be hitting the record stores in January 2016 with a release date of Friday the 15th, making it one of the first on the list albums of the year. It’ll be available on CD, digital download and 12″ vinyl LP and you can see the album artwork in the image above. The Mystery Jets store has a limited number of signed CDs, LPs and litho prints for pre-order for any penmanship aficionados out there.
Singles
Ahead of the album’s release, the band has put out just the one single in the dark and ponderous Telomere, which you can take a listen to with the music video below. It’s a high-pitch warbler of a song from Blaine Harrison and the rest of the Eel Pie Island crew, which takes a little adjusting to in the first instance, sounding more like an offshoot from Muse than anything we’ve come to know and love about Mystery Jets.
The music behind the vocals are made up of some serious art-pop shoegaze synth action, taking the band into much less familiar territory, and while it’s not what we were hoping for or expecting it is done well. The video is equally sideswiping with a whole load of clay, paint and contemporary dance craziness going on that feels a bit like it’s taken some inspiration from Supermassive Black Hole.
Curve Of The Earth track list:
- Telomere
- Bombay blue
- Bubblegum
- Midnight’s Mirror
- 1985
- Blood Red Balloon
- Taken By the Tide
- Saturnine
- The End Up
First impressions
Things have clearly changed for Mystery Jets and they appear to be refocused with an element of musical zeal to push themselves beyond the synth pop glitz of yesteryear. The fact that this is the first album not to feature Kai Fish in the recording studio could play a part, him having left the band just before the release of their last record, Radlands, but if we’re honest it just looks like a desire to move on. The question is whether or not they end up nudging out some of their previous admirers with the new direction they’re taking.
From our point of view, we’re OK-ish with the new track, but we’ll be happier if Curve Of The Earth also includes a few songs that have more in common with Two Doors Down, Young Love and Dreaming Of Another World. However, they would sound very odd next to single, Telomere, so we’re assuming that we’re going to need to make some mental adjustments ahead of the release. It’s very much a further transition from the initial creeps towards more serious intent that we saw on Radland in 2012, but with much more of the old order left behind.
