Zootime

Album Review

Other than Spirit and the Spanic Boys, father-son duos are rare in rock & roll, which gives the U.K. experimental rockers Mystery Jets a leg up right away: lead singer and keyboardist Blaine Harrison is the son of lead guitarist Henry Harrison. It's handy that they have a hook like that for reviewers to latch onto, because it can be difficult for listeners to get their head around the band's full-length debut on its own terms. Zootime is filled with quirky, interesting pop songs, but each seems to be in a different style from the others. For example, "You Can't Fool Me Dennis" sounds like an early, Barry Andrews-era XTC song as covered by Franz Ferdinand: the danceable stomp of the rhythm section keeps the spiraling tune from shooting off in a dozen different directions at once, but only just barely. Meanwhile, the first single "Zoo Time" has the cracked, disorienting post-punk-psychedelia vibe of a classic Teardrop Explodes single, but given an extremely contemporary electronic edge. Then there's the handful of songs that recall Kate Bush and/or Atom Heart Mother-era Pink Floyd. Honestly, none of it makes a lick of sense, but unlike, say, the Beta Band — whose entire shtick was that the parts of their music never fit into a coherent whole — there's a shapeliness to Zootime that suggests the record was constructed from some inscrutable blueprint that's just naggingly out of reach. [Zootime was constructed using 9 songs from the band's UK release Making Dens and three others (including the energetic romp "Scarecrows in the Rain") taken from singles and EP releases].