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Redjetson Help! Mummy! There's a fuck-off huge lumbering giant in my room! It's wielding a glockenspiel! It won't shut up! It sounds really, really, unnervingly, terrifyingly BORED! It's…it's…it's from Southend! OK. An over-reaction, maybe, but those in need of disposable sexy pop thrills are advised to look somewhere, anywhere other than Redjetson's imposing first album. Musically the premise seems to be this: jangle, jingle, jangle, jingle, rumble, mumble, jinglerumblemumblejangle CRESCENDO. ETA of first chorus: six minutes. The good news: when it works, which, in fairness, it does more often than not; it's a disarmingly effective, affective formula. The songs themselves, usually born of a lumbering, punchdrunk, sombre melody, a'loom and a'teeter lethargically on the brink of implosion for as long as is humanly possible - and then for another 24 bars - before exploding into grandiose, widescreen 4am purple-lightbulb post-rock timebombs, scattering shards of chiming guitars over the wreckage. Or - to render it in less portentously poetic terms (probably wise, as Redjetson have freehold over the word portentous here) - imagine Interpol's first album restructured into a sprawling janglescape of heroically fatigued melancholia by The Lift to Experience and/or Godspeed You Black Emperor. It's the kind of record that's normally both embellished and rendered fucking annoying by loads of senseless, histrionic falsetto caterwauling, but frontman Clive (and if you were called Clive, you'd sound this world-weary*) Kentish has a strangely warm drone that sets this otherwise frigid noise aglow. Hope of the States' first album was meant to be this good. Right hype, wrong band. 'New General Catalogue is an acquired taste worth acquiring. *If you are Clive:
Sorry Clive(s). I didn't mean it. It's a lovely name. Honest. Matt Abysmal
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