If you didn’t know that We Were Promised Jetpacks hailed from Glasgow via Edinburgh, Adam Thomson’s pleasantly rolling brogue would still pin them as being from somewhere in the northern part of the Isles. These Four Walls is the quartet’s debut (for Fat Cat); it’s a sprawling post-punk soundscape that echoes with the greys and blues of the sprawling highlands, a tightly-wound gaze at the bleakness and beauty of solitude, desperation, and rain on the moors.
WWPJ’s sound – and this is a sound record – is built on crisp, staccato guitar chords over tightly frantic drumming (see the great extended tom rolls on “Short Bursts”) while Thomson works his voice from collusive whispers to Bono-like shrieks. There’s an urge to compare a lot of Walls to The Joshua Tree; the sense of depth, the gaze fixed on the horizon, the ultra-clean guitar tones, the atmospheric fiddly bits. But the core of the DNA here is Joy Division (and a little Braid). Up-down bass lines punch through jangle chords that turn spidery of a sudden; there’s an immense sense of buildup across each song. Darren Lackie’s drumming (especially his very dancy hi-hat) is much more Stephen Morris than Larry Mullen and Thomson is just so much more personal than Bono could ever be.
Where Walls sometimes frustrates is in the climaxes of its giant buildups – to whit, it often seems to fail to deliver them. The opening track , “It’s Thunder And It’s Lightning”, is one of the few that does; it crashes into you after a long tension increase that swells like Built to Spill covering U2’s “Bad”. My personal favorite – “Roll Up Your Sleeves” – delivers a wonderful anti-climax, sinking from a finely-tuned yawp into a soft repetition of “keep warm” (winter and fighting the cold are central themes on Walls; maybe it gets chilly in Scotland?). But songs like “This is My House, This is My Home” and “Moving Clocks Run Slow” simply keep building, getting louder and faster without the emotional transformation that marks the best of the bands WWPJ are themselves building from. While it almost certainly transforms into sweat and energy on stage, on record it falls a tiny bit flat (unless, of course, you’re in that mood where being unfulfilled is what you’re after….).
Final Grade: A-. I am really tempted to give this record a B+ because I can see how easy it’s going to be for WWPJ to turn into a great band, and I don’t like to give good marks when I know they can do better; but objectively, These Four Walls is really, really, good. If you need a sample download “Roll Up Your Sleeves”, “It’s Thunder And It’s Lightning”, and “Short Bursts”.
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