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Rank Your Records: Mystery Jets Rate Their Five Albums in Order

"I’d like to start off by saying this is a really hard feature to do because it’s like telling your babies they’re not as good as your other babies."

In Rank Your Records, we talk to members of bands who have amassed substantial discographies over the years and ask them to rate their releases in order of personal preference.

As any artist who has done this series before will tell you, it is no easy task to rank your own records in order of preference. Or – if you’d prefer a spicier version of that sentence – in Frank Turner's words: “Let me get it out there that I think pitting records against each other is deeply immoral and like choosing between your children and all that shit.” So, when we asked Mystery Jets to do the same thing, they turned up having told half the band not to bother. “It was hard enough to get two of us to agree,” explains guitarist and vocalist Will, who has brought lead singer Blaine along. “So, the others are not involved.”

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The London band have come a long way since they first gallivanted over the private crossing from the strangely named Eel Pie Island on the River Thames and into the big bad world. Initially performing with their dad in the band (usually to chants of “You’ve got yer dad in the band!”), and clad with lyrics about how “You Can’t Fool Me Dennis” and indie pop parables about a "Boy Who Ran Away", they had all the weird and oddball London squat charm you needed to be a buzz band back when we all read NME and wore pin badge blazers.

But then, unlike their buzz compatriots, like the Klaxons, Little Man Tate or Bromheads Jacket, Mystery Jets actually blossomed into album after album after album. Along came Twenty One in 2008, with the 80s romance of “Two Doors Down”, and a Laura Marling feature on the infectiously sincere “Young Love”. Then came the Count and Sinden produced Copacabana club vibes of “After Dark”, and a new album in 2012 with Radlands.

Ten years after their debut was released, they now boast 5 studio albums and a live record under their belts, making our request that they rank them all a rather sizeable task. As it is, guitarist Will and frontman Blaine have volunteered as tribute. So, here they are, taking us through their ranking process with pain and reluctance.

5. SEROTONIN (2010)

Noisey: So what is your least favourite record that you’ve made?
Wil: Serotonin.

Blaine: This is a hard one.

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Will: We couldn’t really agree on this one. I think Blaine’s having to really swallow some pride on that and let Serotonin be the worst one.

Noisey: Why is Serotonin the worst one?
Will: I’d like to start off by saying this is a really hard feature to do because it’s like telling your babies they’re not as good as your other babies.

That sounds familiar.
Will: Well, I think Serotonin has got to be bottom of the list because for me, as much as I loved making it – Chris Thomas and doing it in London – I think as a record, it’s very much a continuation of Twenty One rather than being its own thing and identifying itself as a unique piece. It’s very much what came out before it. So that’s why.

Blaine: Yeah, I’d continue that and say it’s almost the hangover from Twenty One. It’s the continuation of the imagery, just a little bit darker. Having said that, there are several songs that have really stood the test of time; “Dreaming of Another World” is one of Will’s best and “Alice Springs” is a song that I’m still incredibly proud of and we play live at every gig. That song is about how I’d never been to Australia and all I knew of Australia was Priscilla, Queen of the Desert so I imagined the place they’d come from was just a weird city full of drag queens. Later, when we toured Australia, we discovered it wasn’t far from the truth.

Will: It was the first album we did with Rough Trade.

Blaine: One of my favourite memories is when we decided we wanted a bagpipe player on it and we found the first bagpipe player we could on Google. He was a bagpipe player who normally only played Bar Mitzvahs and he turned up in a penguin outfit. It turned out he had electronic bagpipes which had one pipe and no bag.

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Will: The only song he could play was the Star Wars theme tune so he was completely useless. There are no bagpipes on the album.

4. MAKING DENS (2006)

Here we are then. Your debut.
Will: Our firstborn. Making Dens is a really important record for us because it’s our first one. It’s the sound of five young, naïve people getting really excited about psychedelia and having a prolonged, 2 month progressive rock wet dream on an island on the River Tideway. It’s second on the list because although it had high ideals, it falls short a little bit. The naivety is defining.

Blaine: I don’t really think of it as being an album, it’s more a patchwork of our influences up to that point. Kids discovering they want to be in a band. There’s moments when I can hear we’re trying to sound like The Smiths then next it’s King Crimson or Genesis. It’s a funny one because it was a fan favourite but it was slammed by the critics.

In what way?
Will: There was so much about us that was kind of weird and unusual so maybe people focused on that and not on the music. And in some respects we’re maybe guilty of that ourselves. Making Dens is the sound of a 50-year-old and a bunch of 18-year-olds whacking colanders and maybe overlooking the importance of songcraft. Although it does house my favourite song, “Zootime” which is just a monstrous piece of music that jumps between so many different eras and influences.

Blaine: Also, I remember we were obsessed with field recordings. A lot of swans and Canadian geese found their way onto the tape. I think we were trying to channel a sort of lo-fi outsider thing but it just sounds like ducks quacking in the background.

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3. RADLANDS (2012)

You don't look happy about this one.
Will: This sits at number 3, very uneasily. I find a really interesting record. We made it in Austin, Texas, and it was us fishing for a new direction and a different sound. So we went to another continent and absorbed as much music as we could and filtered that into our own songs. Making a record in America is something a lot of British bands think about doing. If you’re an English band, chances are you love 50 percent of the music that’s come out of America in the past 60 years. You feel indebted to everything they’ve produced so it made sense at the time to get out there and see what would happen.

Blaine: It was our attempt at Exile On Main Street I think. Going off and living out a US adventure fantasy in an old house in the woods outside Austin. We flew out on budget flights and didn’t want to pay excess luggage so we really only took the instruments that were on our backs. The emphasis was much more on capturing the feeling of living out in this house together as opposed to getting lost and found. It was an exploration of the craft of songwriting and discovering Americana records.

Will: I think also before we went out there we all had stars in our eyes thinking, “This will be an incredible adventure and we’re all going to end up having beautiful American girlfriends and having the time of our lives, starting a cult and becoming honorary citizens of the US of A!” We did have a wonderful time out there but it was kind of tinged with a bit of darkness. That darkness came from the fact that there were 4 of us living in this house in the middle of nowhere and only one of us could drive so if anybody wanted to leave, they had to take everybody else with them.

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That sounds pretty cult like.
Will: It was very cult like and also claustrophobic. If we were going to town, we had to all agree on what we wanted to do and the only thing we could all agree on was Bikram Yoga and Whole Foods.

Blaine: It was an alternative Yummy Mummy cult.

2. TWENTY ONE (2008)

This felt like quite a monumental record in your story as a band?
Will: This was a watershed moment for the band, and it was when we really learnt how to write pop songs. It saved our skins a little bit. Making Dens had a lot of expectation built around it but perhaps didn’t win over people who were more interested in songs than pop music. On Twenty One we did an about turn, went in a completely different direction and it paid off.

Blaine: When I listen to it, it sounds like a pack of wolves being let out of a cage. I can taste the time we made it so vividly. It was us just discovering everything for the first time. Staying up all night, going out with the wrong girls, making mistakes. There’s a real excitement about being in your early 20s, living in one of the greatest cities in the world and tasting everything it had to offer, to the point of overdoing it. Those kind of experiences only happen to you once – if you can capture that in some form in music, crystalize it, it’s a very special thing. And no one can take those away from you, the wrong decisions, committing massive fashion crimes as we were known to during Twenty One.

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Ah, the fashion crimes of the noughties are so recent, yet so punishing.
Will: When I see photos of how we looked back then, it does make me shudder.

Blaine: Not only fashion crimes, haircut crimes. One of my defining memories of Twenty One though was being on tour and we hadn’t heard anything from the record label. There was rumours of them culling any artist who hadn’t sold as much as James Blunt, their flagship artist. We were like, “Oh shit, we’re going to come back to the UK and everything will be fucked.” Then we turned up at Glastonbury and played the Park Stage on the Sunday afternoon. We’d all been up since the Friday afternoon. It was one of the defining live moments of our careers – walking out onto that stage and seeing the heavens open up and this field full of people.

Will: It was 6 months after the album had come out and it was the first time we’d looked around and looked at the audience and realised we’d done something kind of alright with Twenty One. To some extent it was working and bringing in a crowd, an audience.

Blaine: And it’s got my favourite of our songs "Flakes".

Will: It was Erol Alkan’s first album so he had a lot to prove. But at the time he gave us a piece of advice that completely saved the Mystery Jets. He said, “You guys are songwriters – focus on that and make that the forefront of what you’re about.”

Blaine: When it comes from the Voldemort of dance music, you can’t argue with it. That’s the way I see him. He has dark forces.

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1. CURVE OF THE EARTH (2016)

Blaine: As songwriters, every now and then it feels like you write a song that’s always existed somehow and you just had to wait for it to find you. Like it’s discovered you. And that’s what we’ve got here. We took our time with this record, we took 3 years. It was a case of not putting the record in a box until we felt it was complete and that we’d written the best songs we possibly could.

Will: It’s the first album we’ve made in total isolation and in total independence. We produced it ourselves along with our great mate Matt Twaites and we did it when we were unsigned and unpublished, in a studio we built ourselves. And it includes our new bass player, Jack Flanagan, who’s now a core member. He’s the guy responsible for injecting us with fresh blood and fresh enthusiasm. Curve of the Earth represents a rebirth of the band and you can hear it in the subject matter as well.

Blaine: After 10 years of making records and being a band, you inevitably find yourself in a position where you take a glance over your shoulder at what you’ve done and sometimes you need to remember why you got into it in the first place. When you’re 15, when you’re 16, why did you go for the guitar instead of something else? For us, we were a band, it’s just what we did, it’s how we spent our time together. But when something becomes your profession and you get paid for it, it’s very easy to forget you do it because you love it. You should never take that for granted. Curve Of The Earth is rediscovering that.

Will: A lot of babies were conceived to this record. On Twenty One, we were going out, fucking up, falling in love., but on this record the new experiences we were having was that a lot of friends were getting married, having families and beginning a new chapter in their lives. This album has that sort of feeling; slightly slowed down and having more perspective on where you’ve been and where you want to get to.

Is it true you recorded this one in a button factory?
Will: Yeah, it came about because of necessity really; we needed a place to regroup. The factory is opposite where Blaine lives. We got in there and cleared out all the dusty old machines, moved all our music stuff in there.

Blaine: As a songwriter all you can really hope for is to create music for your experiences to live in. You have ghosts that live inside of you and if you can make music for them to live in, other people will hear that song and their ghosts can live in it too.

Mystery Jets new album is out on Jan 15. You can follow Moya on Twitter.