Jetplane Landing are a four piece band from Northern Ireland with a DIY approach to making and getting their music out there. Backlash Cop, their 3rd LP is a concept album of sorts, with several songs name-checking people that the band admire, including Dizzy Gillespie, Sam Cooke and Les Savy Fav. Musically excellent throughout, Led Zeppelin and Rage Against the Machine can all be heard in the powerful funk rock of the majority of the tracks, although the band have definitely developed a distinctive overall sound. Several quieter and more thoughtful songs are interspersed across the album as well, including the very excellent ‘Song for Sonia Sanchez’.
It is lyrically however, and through singer Andrew Ferris’s impassioned delivery, that this album really stands out. Slightly less of a call to arms than previous effort ‘Once Like a Spark’ , these intelligent poems are often more of an exercise in storytelling than sloganeering (although this is still present – see ‘White Music’ where Ferris demands of radio DJs, ‘Have you ever played anything that scares you?’). There is even a spoken word track that describes the World Middleweight Boxing heroes of the 1980’s, and for some reason, in context with the rest of the album, it really seems to work.
There are still self analytical and personal moments in places, for example ‘I have more memories than days left to remember them’ from ‘Dizzy Gillespie for President’ or ‘If I were a real solder, I would take your words to the streets, I’d start a riot for you’ from 'Sonia Sanchez' and these serve to add to the overall soul of the record.
A couple of tracks around the middle of the album may arguably fail to match the high standards of those surrounding them but overall the quality of the album is still very high. If you are looking for a guitar rock album that is a little bit different, with more of a groove and more intelligence than average then I would highly recommend this one for you.
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