The Jet Age

“It’s been another shitty year in America, another year where I get to really wonder what the hell I’ve gotten my kids into,” says Eric Tischler, songwriter, guitarist and singer for The Jet Age, about the inspiration behind his band’s latest record, Destroy. Rebuild due August 28. With more than one narrator seemingly lost at sea (as on the slow-boiling acid folk of “Who Will I Sing This Song For?” and the Can-meets-The Bats boogie of “Hand Upon the Throttle”), and The Who-meets-MBV rant “I Can’t Breathe,” it’s not surprising that many of the lyrics were written in the shadow of the U.S.’s 2014 midterm elections, and the disturbing news cycle around Ferguson’s police force, and Eric Garner’s death. The new set of songs address peoples’ struggles to find their way home, and the themes feel more prescient every day, following events like the recent riots in Baltimore.

The album’s last song, “Epilogue,” suggests the rebirth needs to begin with a kiss–right before it’s blistering two-plus minute guitar solo kicks in; so, all you need is love?  “The flip side of all this depressing crap—including watching some other couples around me go down in flames–is that it’s really renewed my appreciation for the ways in which my wife and kids provide a port in the storm so, yeah,” he smiles, “it’s about relationships, it’s about the country, it’s about the band.”

Lyrics with a heavy thematic weight require a sonic landscape suited to them, and Tischler’s approach to recording the Jet Age in his home studio in Washington, D.C. (he’s also the producer, mixer, and mastering engineer) lent itself to meeting these lofty goals. “We recorded all the basic tracks live in the same room.” Tischler explains. “It was awesome, because everyone could maintain eye contact, no one needed headphones and there was just enough bleed to glue it all together.”

“This time, I really tried to stay out of the way and make sure there was enough room for everything Pete, Greg and I were bringing to the table,” says Tischler. And what they bring is drummer Pete Nuwayser’s thrillingly combustible marriage of jazz-like feel and apocalyptic fills, Bennett’s elegant and compelling lines, and Tischler’s spare, open chords and penchant for white-hot distortion pedals.

“I felt like, on previous Jet Age records, I was increasingly distracted by the desire to write ‘types’ of songs and that maybe, after a string of ‘rock operas,’ I was shortchanging the emotional core of the songwriting with all these intellectual exercises,” he explains. “I figured, if we wrote an album full of songs that sounded like Stevie Wonder, and Duran Duran, and The Small Faces, that I’d get those urges out of my system and I could find my way back to ‘my’ voice.” That record was 2014’s Jukebox Memoir, and it might’ve remained unheard, as Tischler viewed it as a songwriting exercise, but once Mark Gardener [Ride] and Adam Franklin [Swervedriver] added vocals to the album’s shoegazing homage, “I felt we had a moral obligation to put the record out,” Tischler laughs.

Fortunately, the entire record was pretty damn good and his initial plan of cleansing his songwriting palate seems to have worked, because, with Jukebox in the rearview mirror, Destroy. Rebuild sounds precisely like the moment when The Jet Age finally rebuild themselves in their own image, like a phoenix engulfed in flames and rising from the ashes of their previous selves, ready to give us the sounds and songs of revolution and wishing for better.