These Four Walls
Glasgow, Scotland has quite a few bands bursting from its confines with similarly contoured sounds. We Were Promised Jetpacks have already been likened to labelmates Frightened Rabbit and the Twilight Sad, while traces of other Brit bands such as Futureheads and Bloc Party can also be overheard in the band’s pulsing menace. “Moving Clocks Run Slow” may be the album’s most effective track, with its stripped down beginnings that over five minutes twist and turn with an extra sprint and some infectious backing vocals drive its melodic points home. “Short Bursts” replicates the sound of a teletype machine struggling to keep up with the day’s news, but songs such as “Roll Up Your Sleeves” and “ Quiet Little Voices” struggle with a sorrowful undertow dogging their anthemic ambitions. At eight minutes, “Keeping Warm” is the band’s epic, a track that attempts to hold all of life in a fragile hand. Looking for a modest turn, the band ends things with a quiet acoustic number, “An Almighty Thud” that suggests these boys accept and even enjoy their desperate fate.
This debut by FatCat's latest Scottish discovery is exactly what you'd expect from the label that gave us the Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit.
Like their friends in The Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit, the members of the Scot-rock act We Were Promised Jetpacks excel at freezing moments. The band’s debut album, These Four Walls, even opens with a precise image—“Right foot followed by your left foot / got to get you home by curfew”—that captures the feeling…
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We Were Promised Jetpacks have a lot in common with their fellow Glaswegians Frightened Rabbit and the Twilight Sad: not only do they share a label, FatCat, but their takes on earnest Scottish indie bear more than a passing resemblance to each other.
The close-knit community they make no hiding of being part of now offers us We Were Promised Jetpacks - a band whose debut album has finally come together after years of being together, winning battle of the bands competitions and waiting for something to give.
Cards on the table: We Were Promised Jetpacks' signing to FatCat was a surprise to many music fans watching the Scottish unsigned music scene.
There must be something in the water up there, as the debut by Fat Cat's latest signing from Northern Britain attests.
We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls review: Direct and impressive indie-rock from Frightened Rabbit's labelmates; there's enough solid, and sometimes fantastic, material here to suggest they're very much a band to keep your eyes on.