Drugstore
Songs For The Jet Set

DRUGSTORE - SONGS FOR THE JET SET

A guitar, a xylophone, and eleven days in May

I've been hearing water running on the street all morning, as if someone is washing the asphalt. Occasionally I look down to understand, but I see no one, yet the sound is as close as if it were just beyond my window. Then I observe the trees, and I understand. It was the wind passing through the branches giving the foliage that liquid sound. This would be enough to describe the sensation one feels when listening to the latest studio effort by Drugstore, now dating back to 2001.

A disarming simplicity, a homogeneity of intentions as opposed to the varied and colorful universe of their previous work, "White Magic For Lovers" (2001). The English band's weapons are always the same: acoustic guitars, keyboard like chimes, cello. The songs flow one after another like water, mostly light, slow, and soft ("Navegando"), with a few others just a bit faster or wilder ("I Wanna Love You Like A Man").

Just the opening song, "Baby Don't Hurt Yourself", gives you the feeling of being cradled in a warm bath, with candles flickering on the edges of the tub and the slide guitars blowing under your skin... or in the sweetness of the duet "The Party Is Over", a melancholy that tastes of the party being over, with the house to tidy up and hope echoing in the heart like the rhythm of the chorus. It's true, some tracks may go unnoticed ("Hate", "Little Girl"), but if one listens carelessly they seem to ferry the listener over this water from one song to a whisper ("Wayward Daughter"). And if for a moment we can be distracted by the epic end of "Thin Air", with its bouncing piano and hinted choir, we soon return to almost playful nursery rhyme tones with "Allegro Ma Non Troppo" -for two minutes Isabel whispers "I'm allegro ma non troppo, dove e la, dove e la feliccita", exact words from the booklet-, ending with the folkish crescendo of "Flying Down To Rio".

To avoid contradicting this intimacy, this internal coherence, to put it technically, the album ends murmuring softly, until the ghost track, where acoustic voice and violin walk hand in hand along a nonexistent score. Don't expect the pinnacle of acoustic indiefolk: as I said at the beginning it's nothing more than wind passing through the leaves, "Songs For The Jet Set" has nothing pretentious, it's just a small simple album recorded in eleven days of May, with a week of rehearsals behind and the last day for mixing, as the booklet says - more than a booklet, a sheet folded in four, with the lyrics and photos of a doll's adventure-. from "Wayward Daughter"

"If you could see the morning light / Coming through this winter sky / So the mystery unfolds / When the black turns into gold / Long time ago I had a friend / Who told me nothing matters / Then she says “Well then again, life’s no laughing matter” Look at all the crazy people / Running