Preconceptions are usually kind of a bitch, but they've mostly worked in this Scottish band's favor. Knowing that they were championed by Frightened Rabbit on MySpace and then signed to FatCat would have you believe that they're similarly aligned as scrappy, heart-on-sleeve romantics. And yes, their 2009 debut, These Four Walls, delivered on that notion, however intermittently. But based on the name We Were Promised Jetpacks, you might think they're a hyper-stimulated and wordy post-hardcore/emo act too. That's also kinda true. Shuttling between the sound of weathered, masculine brooding and the lyrical sentiment of immobilized, teenage pining, they're something of a genre of one that's managed to sound perfectly compatible as an opener for both Twilight Sad and Jimmy Eat World.
There was hope that These Four Walls, like most overeager and uneven debuts from killer live acts, was a dry run for inevitable greatness once their execution caught up with their energy. And yet, while more focused in just about every way conceivable (no more eight-minute songs with glockenspiels), In the Pit of the Stomach can't seem to move things forward, weirdly sitting in a purgatory of sounding like an anthemic rock record without the actual anthems.
Feeling stuck is certainly something WWPJ identify with. As with These Four Walls, the pervading feeling expressed on In the Pit of the Stomach is foretold by its title: a sense of jittery readiness as reaction to the unease of being trapped inside yourself. Fittingly, WWPJ's musicianship sports the tightly-coiled motions of someone trying to bust out of restraints-- drill-like riffs and insistent hi-hats are punctuated by short, almost epileptic bursts of distortion and drum rattle. Despite the roomy lengths and arena aspirations of these songs, Peter Katis' strapping production casts WWPJ as meticulous and muscular post-punk militants at their core. Though they don't aspire to the jackbooted combativeness of WU LYF or Iceage, Thompson's melodies do have an orderly, call-and response aspect to them.
And yet this newly disciplined sound mostly reveals a band that has the earnest diligence of foot soldiers but not the spark of leadership. Catharsis is something they just don't have the patience for, and In the Pit of the Stomach blasts out of your speakers from "Circles and Squares" and never yields, buzzing constantly rather than building toward moments of rabble-rousing revelation.
While posing as assaults, "Medicine" and "Picture of Health" ingratiate their jagged hooks subtly through insistent repetition. But elsewhere, WWPJ typically treat verse-chorus structure like a straitjacket with the longer instrumental passages feeling just as maxed-out for radio readiness: first single "Act on Impulse" patiently works through some pretty, post-rock guitar figures during its build-up to the verse, yet it ends five minutes later without reaching any kind of gratification-- it's just a single with an unusually long intro. The LP's one true blowout comes halfway through "Sore Thumb", and it requires a preceding production trick where you hear Thompson's voice, stripped of all studio treatment, sounding like he's doing practice takes in a hallway. I've heard this done on Snow Patrol records. And while I get the feeling "Pear Tree" was intended as an epic, exhaustive closer because it's six minutes long, it draws to a close pounding as loud as anything else on the record. This leaves Pit to end with the vague sense that you've been pummeled for the last 45 minutes but with no real recollection of the specifics. It's the sort of thing that can feel thrilling in perhaps five-minute bursts, but the evenness of Pit's landscape makes it hard for me to say which five minutes that is.
Admittedly, it's easy to be a sucker for Thompson's Edinburgh accent and to assume it lends a wizened gravitas to his grief over enlisting in "an army that only fights boredom" and painting rainbows black. But unlike the rangy vocals of benefactors like Scott Hutchison and James Graham, there's something wooden about Thompson's intonation that betrays his hot-blooded emotional state. For the most part, WWPJ show up to each track with the same bundle of nervous energy and simply churn until they wear themselves out. Though Thompson's plaintive wails and the brawny playing of the rhythm section give the impression of relentless and differentiable activity, they're holding patterns all the same.
