We Were Promised Jetpacks, The More I Sleep The Less I Dream

It’s bizarre to even type it, but it’s been longer than I’d realized since I last heard anything from one of my favorite bands, Edinburgh’s We Were Promised Jetpacks. They released the stellar Unravelling back in 2014, and I loved it, and I finally got to see the band play live and loved that, too, and then…well, nothing, for a good long while.

And I happily listened and re-listened to Unravelling and the band’s debut, 2009’s These Four Walls and a few tracks off 2011’s In the Pit of the Stomach (which I’ll freely admit is my least-favorite album), and it never occurred to me to say, “Hey, what happened to those guys?”

As it turns out, quite a bit. Over the course of the past four years, We Were Promised Jetpacks decamped back home to Scotland, pared back down to their original four-person lineup, changed record labels (from Fat Cat to Big Scary Monsters), got married (well, some of the band did, anyway), got older, and just generally tried to get back to the Real Life stuff that gets put on the side while you’re continuously touring and recording and touring and recording, ad infinitum.

And then, somewhere in there, they started writing songs, working on them until they were ready to go before taking ’em into the studio (which ended up being Miner Street Recordings in Philadelphia and The National’s Long Pond Studios in upstate NY, both with engineer/producer Jonathan Low).

If it sounds like I’m griping about the band’s absence, I assure you that I’m not, especially not with new album The More I Sleep The Less I Dream blasting from my headphones. Because it’s immediately obvious the band has used the time away to good effect, simultaneously refocusing and branching out in terms of their sound – in a way, it seems like Sleep is We Were Promised Jetpacks finding themselves again and remembering what it was they loved about making music in the first place.

Taken as a whole, the album feels thoughtful in the same way Unravelling did, with singer/guitarist Adam Thompson and the band (Michael Palmer on guitar, Sean Smith on bass, and Darren Lackie on drums) ruminating about relationships, loss, the modern world, and all the rest, but where that album was dark and murky and menacing, The More I Sleep The Less I Dream feels more personal, simpler, almost more down-to-earth. It’s still uncertain and nervous, to be sure, but where the previous album absolutely fit its name, a picture of a person/people coming apart at the seams, here We Were Promised Jetpacks seems to be finding the beauty in that uncertainty, in that feeling of not being able to know what’s coming.

And what a beauty it is. The album’s opener, “Impossible,” is gorgeously slow-building, with majestic, thundering/echoing, Explosions in the Sky-esque guitars and Thompson’s singing going from gentle melancholy to roaring grandeur with the inexorable force of a mountaintop snow-melt stream pushing its way down to cascade down the cliff face. Further in, sweet, fragile instrumental “Improbable” follows the same thread, riding a line between the Texas-bred pastoralism of the aforementioned band and the quieter moments of fellow Scots Mogwai.

There’s an interesting bend towards a New Wave-ish sound on Sleep, one that goes in a direction the band’s never really gone towards before now. “Someone Else’s Problem” has a definite art-rock feel to it, with an almost funky bassline under guitars that alternate between a furious squall and a drifting cloud of pretty notes, with Thompson’s pleading, recriminating vocals running alongside.

The track makes me think, weirdly, of a Scottish version of The Killers, with maybe a little bit of Two Door Cinema Club thrown in. “When I Know More” is similar, with lots of New Wave influences peeking in around the edges, while “Make It Easier” has these great, stomping, crunching drums and makes me think of the better parts of In the Pit of the Stomach.

My favorite track is definitely “In Light,” which is urgent and tense, an insistent blur of upward-climbing guitars, keys, and desperate, sing-song vocals. There’re elements that bring to mind Hold Your Fire-era Rush (no, seriously), especially with regard to the intro, but they cohabitate with The Smiths in a buzzing ball of wires.

“Not Wanted” is a close second despite being a totally different kind of song — it’s a somber, beautiful confessional, with lyrics that keep repeating in my skull: “I aim so high / I fall on my backside / I get so weird / Because I get scared.” Then there’s “Repeating Patterns,” all energetic busy-ness and probably the closest thing to the band’s debut album of any of the tracks on Sleep.

All other comparisons aside, though, what I keep coming back to for this release is early, i>Pablo Honey-/The Bends-era Radiohead. The arrangement of “Hanging In,” with its swinging groove and steady descent from cheerful friendliness into defensive anger, particularly evokes Radiohead’s poppier moments. It’s not hard to hear Thom Yorke muttering/snarling “Don’t rush me / don’t rush me / don’t rush” as the song rolls along. Similarly, both the chord changes and the sinister guitar line that fades in and out on the final track sound like the best Radiohead song you’ve never heard.

That said, the comparison to Radiohead’s sound — both bands are similarly tense and languid at once — is only half of the story. See, like that band, We Were Promised Jetpacks have the ability to make music that’s serious and oblique without coming off as pretentious (okay, I’m sure some folks will disagree on that with regard to Radiohead, but work with me, here).

That’s a rare, rare thing, and it’s one of the reasons I can listen to this band pretty much any damn time and place. They’re that friend where, even if you haven’t seen one another in a few years, you start talking and it all still clicks, like no time’s passed at all. No matter where I am or what’s going on, I can put on We Were Promised Jetpacks and feel like everything’s exactly as it should be, at least for a little while.