Jet—Get Born

Great music is based on two fundamental things: The musicians’ desire to emulate other great musicians, and their desire to do their own new, creative thing. It takes equal parts of each to make an excellent album. Jet’s debut, Get Born, is a great example of this seemingly contradictory fact.

Many of Jet’s songs are reminiscent of rock-and-roll greats like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Bob Dylan, and others, yet they are not mere rehashings of the same old things. Get Born‘s thirteen tracks leave no doubt that this is a new band making new music, and likewise they leave no doubt that the band longs for the days when music was…well…good.

The lead single, Are You Gonna Be My Girl?, has been featured in an Apple iPod/iTunes silhouette advertisment and is played ad nauseum in radio advertising, but it is other tracks that really show Jet’s talent. Songs like Cold Hard Bitch—a rollicking song that proves rock-and-roll hasn’t died yet—and Look What You’ve Done—a mellow, Beatlesque song reminiscent of Hey Jude or Let It Be—get in your head and stay for days.

Since I purchased Get Born, I’ve played the entire album over and over again. That says a lot, since my typical style of-late has been to add new albums into my sprawling iTunes randomizer without hardly a second thought. It is not a perfect disk (Lazy Gun, in particular, grates on me), but it is close.

4.5 out of 5 stars.