The Adventures of Jet, Muscle

The press release claims that “The Adventures of Jet’s Muscle is, at its core, a concept album…the songs on Muscle follow a central theme; in this case, muscle cars and the idea that with the newfound freedom that comes along with owning a set of wheels during adolescence comes the realization that those carefree days are fleeting.” The casual listener won’t notice this supposed concept, mostly because the risky decision of placing a singer with heavily stylized pronunciation low in the mix with cymbal-happy drums and a prominent, breezy organ in the same register as the singer’s voice — consistently the same prominent, breezy organ, consistently in the same register — makes the lyrics largely inaudible. But okay. Giving the band the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume that the concept really carries, and let’s look back to another album that, at least partially, shares the concept: Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town.

On that record, only one song, “Racing in the Street,” deals thematically with cars, but several others, most notably “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “The Promised Land” at least mention the topic. Putting aside the fact that the Boss was able to deal in one song and some scraps with a topic that The Adventures of Jet needs a whole record to dispatch, let’s take a look at the title track: three verses, the last with an extended climax, and each one ending with that unison stop-time riff: “there’s a darkness on the e-e-e-e-edge of town.” So memorable. I hadn’t heard this record in fifteen years and it still stuck with me, somewhere where I couldn’t quite pull it up to conscious memory, but it was part of my idea of popular music. It’s hard to imagine anything on Muscle sticking like that. How about “Racing in the Street?” That beautiful, organic-sounding organ solo repeated as the song’s coda, such delicate musicianship from a record so thematically brutal: “weeeeeee, weedle weedle weeeeeeee…weedle weedle weeeee…weedle weedle wee-eeeeeee…” Well, I suppose the phonetic transcription doesn’t do it justice, but by contrast, the same would serve Muscle‘s keyboards quite accurately.

I suppose this line of reasoning isn’t really fair, as not many records would compare favorably to the shining moments of a great rock-n-roll hero in his prime — although it’s every artist’s responsibility to take into account their predecessors, especially before they decide to tackle such a powerful archetype as CARS. But the point is that each of these songs is built around a distinct idea that trumps considerations, well worthwhile in The Adventures’s case, of originality and variety. The lack of such ideas is what ultimately dooms such a thematic exercise as Muscle. The band might do better to stick to such minor triumphs as “Emily Mazurinsky,” an effective piece of Rentals-esque ’80s-throwback-keyboard-pop glee that features a keyboard line that’s actually fairly clever, and stop masquerading as a band with things on its mind. But I suppose we should let each man choose for himself which muse is more authentic: “I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost for wanting things that can only be found in the darkness on the edge of town” or “It’s like I’m on drugs; I don’t feel like myself.”