Serotonin

The Mystery Jets sit around a vast table, upstairs in a plush West London studio. Downstairs in the control room, putting the finishing touches to the third Mystery Jets album, Serotonin, lurks Chris Thomas, legendary producer of Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure, the Sex Pistols Anarchy In The UK, John Cale's Paris 1919 and Pulp's Different Class, of whom the Mystery Jets understandably seem a little in awe. He can hear things that none of us can hear, whispers guitarist William Rees. He s got dog s ears. And he has the best stories, nods lead singer Blaine Harrison. The anecdotes are just unbelievable.

The sound emerging from the studio today sounds infinitely less chaotic, but no less inventive. After stripping away much of the excess on their lovelorn, warmly-received 2008 album Twenty One, Serotonin sees the Mystery Jets mapping out entirely new musical territories with the synthesizer-fueled perfect pop of Dreaming Of Another World and It's Too Late, which begins as an aching soft-rock ballad before unexpectedly heading somewhere infinitely weirder. In the dark, hallucinatory grind of Lorna Doone, you can hear echoes of ELO, 10CC, Fleetwood Mac and Supertramp rubbing up against the band's own idiosyncratic, very British, psychedelic sensibility.