If your guilty pleasure involves dancing around your living room in a white blazer, light pink ascot, and boat shoes…you might as well be listening to Mystery Jets while you do so. Their latest album, Serotonin, is built around lively synths and lasting melodies that make it hard to play it cool behind your Ray-Bans. An unlikely troupe, the English quintet is led by a father/son duo (Henry and Blaine Harrison, respectively). Formed when Blaine was merely eight-years-old, Mystery Jets have been around for several years and experimented with a variety of styles, but their third studio album finds them in a comfortable indie-pop groove with enough believable emotion to warrant multiple listens.
It seems inevitable that the retro vibe well get stale after the first few tracks, but Serotonin includes sufficient instrumental textures and vocal variations to keep things interesting beyond the standout singles, such as “Dreaming of Another World” and “Flash a Hungry Smile.” Whether it’s syncopated beats or effortless harmonies, the album feels consistently tight…like that of a family. Your childhood best friend just happened to pick up a guitar with his dad and now you’re trying to sleep over there whenever possible. But for a “family band” of sorts, they touch on darker struggles and personal defeats that (when coupled with the unflinching upbeat tunes) provide the perfect balance to help this record succeed regardless of the listener’s mood.
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