Journal: News & Comment

Do ya, honey?

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There's nothing remotely original about the band Jet or their album Get Born. The album cover shamelessly apes Klaus Voorman's drawing/photo collage style from Revolver. Listening to the first track, "Last Chance," I felt I'd stumbled into an AC/DC release on the verses, and a lost recording from the hard-poppin' mid-'60s Beatles sound-alikes the Knickerbockers on the choruses.

Both Dewey Finn and Beavis and Butt-Head would love this album: these musicians, unlike the White Stripes, take classic rock not just as an inspiration, but as a template. Snippets of the Kinks, the Beatles, the MC5, Iggy and the Stooges, Oasis, and the Ramones (plus BTO, Gary Glitter, and the Knack, for that matter) fly out at you like shards off a steel grinder. Singer Nic Cester lets out a Roger Daltrey-style Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaah! on almost every cut. Most of the lyrics are about hip-shakin', long-legged women in high boots. It takes three tracks before there's enough of a breather for a guitar solo, and then it's deliciously short.

The rest of the tunes follow from there. And they're fabulous. It's all jangle-crunch guitars, tubby bass, falling-down-the-stairs drums, and throat-shredding singing, with the occasional tambourine, organ, and piano thrown in. No song outstays its welcome—because they range from less than two to not quite five minutes long. Even the ballads are decent, probably because they rip off the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and Wilco. (Jet wouldn't deny it, since they sing "Take a look at what I took, a leaf out of everybody's book.")

And of course there's that iPod commercial song, "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?" You know it: "One two three take my hand and come with me 'cuz you look so fine that I really wanna make you mine," and then the riff taken straight from "Lust for Life."

At one point, Cester sings "Now I'm in a rockin' band," and I have only one word to say to that:

Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaah!

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