Album: Jet

Shine On, ATLANTIC

"The first album was written for pubs," says drummer Chris Cester of Jet's four million-selling debut Get Born. "This one is written for stadiums!" And certainly, there's no denying the more impressive musical musculature on show, as if the band had spent the intervening three years under Charles Atlas's guidance.

Support slots behind the Stones and Oasis helped expand the band's sound, too, though the same can't be said for their musical outlook, which has retrenched further into the riff-based rebel-rocker schtick they learnt from those bands. It's an easy act to ape, but a hard one to develop in any original manner: songs like "Holiday" and "Come On Come On" are Oasean not just in sound and attitude, but also in the way they summon echoes of various residents of the rock pantheon, memories which tarnish the lustre of Jet's third-generation versions.

The same appliesthroughout Shine On: hearing the single "Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is", with its swaggering drums and power-chords, one wonders what an actual collaboration between AC/DC and The Faces might have sounded like, rather than Jet's ersatz approximation. On "Skin And Bones", the results summon memories of The Black Crowes, another band who used the Exile On Main Street textbook as their launch-pad, and who struggled to establish themselves beyond those parameters.

Jet do make one or two attempts to broaden their approach - the folk-rocker "King's Horses", and the Sixties pop tone of "Shiny Magazines" - but they're largely reliant on other golden oldie influences, notably The Beatles, and are swamped by the breast-beating attitude exemplified by such blustery title exhortations as "Shine On", "Come On Come On", "Stand Up" and "Rip It Up". There's little trace of the "swampy surrealism" the band claim to appreciate in the work of Captain Beefheart and Dr John: these songs are mired in rock cliches such as "Did you ever get the feeling you were born to lose?", "I think I see the light", and, on the title-track ballad dedicated to the Cester brothers' late father, the claim that "Everything will be okay/We will meet again some day", lines lazy and uninspired enough to have been written by Oasis themselves.

So perhaps it's just as well that Jet aren't trying too hard to broaden their approach beyond the meat'n'spuds blues-rock with which they made their name, and of which they have a firmer grasp on this effort. There'll always be a demand for well-wrought, blue-collar raunch-rock, and the Stones can't fulfill it forever. Can they?

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'That's All Lies', 'Shiny Magazines', 'Skin And Bones'