Next time you're sitting in an oxygen bar, sucking down O2 cocktails on a stolen credit card, I know the song that'll be playing in the background. It'll be one of those life-changing moments of introspection where everything goes slo-mo as the first-person camera pans slowly around, pausing on the faces of all the patrons in their powder-blue jumpsuits. You'll see their vacuous smiles, but their sad eyes will betray how hollow and unhappy they really are. "Hey," you'll think, "I'm not gonna be like these soulless robots; I'm through with stolen credit cards and oxygen bars-- I'm gonna make something outta my life!" Seriously, it'll be way touching; life-affirming, even. And the song that'll be backing this futuristic moment of clarity will be the sterling space-gospel of Polara's "Jetpack Blues".
Spacy but heartfelt vocal effects, choir-like chorus, and reverb-drenched guitar atmospherics that would make The Edge sweat(ier) form a song more easily described with ridiculous Gernsback-infused vignettes than actual descriptors. The rest of Jetpack Blues never quite measures up to the title track, but that one alone will nearly justify the $13 sticker on this digipak'd CD. The remainder of Polara's latest seems content to rest on its laurels, offering solid but slightly generic rock. The six-stringers bite off giant hunks of Achtung Baby with the occasional blues riff worming its way into the rush, while the electronics and effects are nothing but ray-guns, hovercrafts, and chrome.
If it were all that rosy, of course, this would be a stellar album, but after about five tracks of the same formulaic arrangements (excepting "Jetpack Blues", which is unique among the rest) it becomes clear that the future might not be quite as bright as it seems. Individually, these songs are solid, uptempo kernels of sci-fi sounds, but the non-stop effects-peddling that's genuinely refreshing for one track starts to suck the soul out of the album before long. The result is that the songs begin to blend together into what might as well be a single (albeit damn fine) forty-minute epic. Eventually, a numbing stillness sets in and the album passes overhead.
That numbness remains until the last actual song on the album, "The Story So Far", a stripped-down number notable primarily for breaking the pace. Polara excels at sweeping, large-scale rock, and this track, if nothing else, makes it clear that they should stick to that. In particular, "The Story So Far" falls prey to the one other real flaw of Jetpack Blues, in that frontman Ed Ackerson's vocals are as often achingly cheesy as they are sincere. It's not much trouble on the grand scale of most of these tracks, but it does gets cloying on a more intimate cut like this one.
This is all nitpicking, though. While a lot of Jetpack Blues might be unremarkable, it's still insanely fun at points. The massive opener, "Can't Get Over You", is the perfect track to pop in the tape deck just before you break the landspeed record (in sort of a good, Lance Armstrong, achievement way, as opposed to a bad, Vin Diesel, crappy-blockbuster way). And even if you don't plan on breaking the sound barrier anytime soon (loser), supersonic speeds are unnecessary to enjoy the hilariously titled "Wig On", which briefly reaches up from the mid-album lull to arrest your attention with Jennifer Jurgen's gorgeous backing vocals. The irony, really, is that Polara attempts to evoke oddly futuristic qualities through a synthesis of mild electronics while the music underneath owes everything to the guitar-heavy rock of almost two decades ago. Of course, that's not a bad thing; it just doesn't sound current is all. But if nothing else, when this kind of stuff has its renaissance fifteen years from now, your kids'll love it.
