9/14/2010 & 9/15/2010 All the best bands create their own universe. Few, however, create one as strange and bewitching as the Mystery Jets. Based on Eel Pie Island, the Bohemian stronghold in the middle of the Thames at Twickenham, the Mystery Jets embody British pop at its most invigoratingly weird. Already, previous singles ‘Zoo Time’, ‘You Can’t Fool Me Dennis’, ‘On My Feet’ and ‘Alas Agnes’ have seemed like dispatches from some starry-eyed parallel universe. A universe where Syd Barrett never dropped out but played on with Einzurstende Neubauten, where the irresistible pop of Dexy’s can happily co-exist with the Krautrock explorations of Can, and where the most forbidding musical forms of the past, like prog rock, are gleefully reinvented in the smash-and-grab spirit of the present. Now those dispatches have given way to a full-on, widescreen statement – the Mystery Jets’ debut album ‘Making Dens’. Recorded with producer and fellow musical visionary James Ford, it’s guaranteed to add a technicolor new dimension to Britain’s thriving young rock ‘n’ roll scene. Songs like ‘Purple Prose’, ‘Alas Agnes’ and the climactic ‘Making Dens’ take you on a psychedelic head-trip through joy, misery and the full spectrum of emotions in between. ‘On A Trembling Day’ combines lyrical imagery from Van Gogh’s final paintings with music so intense it’s like you’re in the artist’s own despairing mind. ‘Soluble In Air’, recorded in the Eel Pie Island boat yard, site of Mystery Jets gigs legendary for fan hysteria and circus-style bizarreness, weaves together church bells and choral harmonies into a star-surfing fantastia, which is nonetheless utterly English. Comparisons are odious, but if this album doesn’t do for British music what the Arcade Fire did for America (and more), then we’ll eat Syd Barrett’s mandrax-infused hair gel. Mystery Jets are Will Rees (guitar/vocals, 20), Kai Fish (bass/vocals, 21), Kapil Trivedi (drums/vocals, 20), Blaine Harrison (keyboard/vocals, 20) and his father Henry Harrison (guitars/vocals, “slightly older”). Will and Blaine met at nursery school at the age of four. Kai’s parents lived with Blaine’s parents in a commune in the Seventies (“we used to share hash cookies together”, notes Henry, a former architect). When Will went to boarding school and Blaine moved to France with his mother, the pair used to communicate via postcards which were, says Blaine, “the early stages of the band. We used to do drawings of all the different line-ups. Henry was always in the band.”