In a bold move, Radlands marks the band’s first concept album and is a far cry from the well-worn synth-driven pop sounds of their previous three releases. Stripped back and layered with lap steel, prior to their last visit co-lyricist William Rees had fantasised about heading abroad and in a completely new direction for their next recording endeavour. It was Austin, Texas that finally won them over in their desire to tear up the rulebook and get as far away from their pop legacy as possible.
Back on the phone in anticipation of another Australian tour, Rees talks about how the group’s initial pipe dream of escaping England and pressing a restart button on their sound came to fruition ahead of Radlands in 2011. “Originally, half the band wanted to go to LA, and the other half wanted to go to New Orleans,” Rees recounts. “We thought because none of us could really agree on which place we wanted to go to we just settled on the place which was in the middle of the two, which was Austin. There’s a lot of local talent and a sense of music there – it’s like everyone draws from a musician, or some sort of country song. It feels like a language.
“It was definitely our version of the American dream – we wanted to go there and find for ourselves what a lot of people go to America to find. To discover something new for themselves, change their lives, and explore their potential and possibilities. America has always been a land of hope and a land of dreams, and a lot of those dreams have gone wrong perhaps, but a lot of those dreams have gone right. We went there with that kind of attitude. There’s a lot of beliefs over there, there’s a lot people who believe in a lot of things, but what they do believe in, they believe strongly. That is something that I think defines America; you don’t really find that too much in other countries.”
Settling into a house by the Colorado River, which they had soon dubbed Radlands (a cross between a Terrence Malik reference and the name of Keith Richards’ house Redlands from the ‘60s), William and his band mates Blaine Harrison (vocals, guitar), Kapil Travedi (drums) and now ex-member Kai Fish, set up a home studio, adorned their front gate with a sign and a lone star and proceeded to throw themselves into every aspect of culture Austin could offer them.
“A lot of what we did when we were out in Austin was spending time researching things in the area”, Rees explains. “We looked at cults and how they go wrong, and how they start. And there’s a lot of stuff that happened in Texas, one of which was the Waco cult. That turned into a complete bloodbath, but initially it started off as one man having a vision, and feeling like he was a prophet from God. Things like that we were looking into and writing about and putting into our lyrics.
“We also tried to find out a lot about the local people and what local people did, so we went to Church one occasion. The way we went in, it was almost like we were anthropologists or something; we were on the ground meeting people and reading about the history and trying to find out about where we were, basically. Then we put that into our music.”
It was also the creation of their own world within the gates of Radlands through an alter-ego by the name of Emmerson Lonestar that lead the Mystery Jets to explore and draw on a whole new range of emotion within their writing. The fictional protagonist that appears throughout the album allowed the band to open up. “He was a device,” Rees asserts. “The songs on Radlands are a combination of both real experiences and imagination; often you need a real experience to ignite it and then once it’s hot, you can take it where you want to take it. Which is where Emmerson Lonestar and the imagination of it comes in.” Rees adds, “That was a cool thing for us to write about because it’s different from writing about the girl two doors down, which is quite English, quite sweet. But in America we found lots of different things to inspire us.”
Upon its release earlier this year, the finished product of Radlands drew divisive opinions from critics thanks to such a radical move away from the sounds recognised on albums 21 and Serotonin. Embodying more Eagles and less of The Cure, the Mystery Jets will finally be able to bring their mixture of old and new material to life on stage. “It has been quite hard to incorporate the two different sounds together, but we’ve found that a handful of songs work really well alongside the new material,” Rees explains. “The songs that do work, we’ve updated them to the current sounds so some of them have got pedal steel on them. It’s been really nice to see that all this time we’ve had some of these songs that for some reason feel like they could have been on Radlands, but they were on other records.” And just how much significance will the pedal steel have throughout their set? “We couldn’t do a show without it now!”
BY TEGAN BUTLER
