Music Nation

Jets Overhead give up on industry and write perfect songs

A few things spring to mind while listening to local rockers Jets Overhead’s new disc, No Nations. For starters, it’s a wonderfully textured affair, one that brings layers of melody and dissonance into their pop framework (“We chose ‘time’ over ‘bling,’” says vocalist-keyboardist Antonia Freybe-Smith about the album’s recording sessions). It’s also a remarkably accomplished and mature disc, for a band who once called themselves the Special Guests. And if “Heading for Nowhere” isn’t tied with Oh Snap!’s “Dance like You’re Blind” for locally grown should-be-hit-single of the year, I’ll stop writing weekly articles for Monday. But Freybe-Smith says the band isn’t trying to write the perfect single.

“To be honest, we pretty much gave up on radio a long time ago,” she says. “If one of our songs ended up being a radio hit that would be a lovely, welcomed surprise. The true goal with No Nations was to make a record that our friends would want to listen to while driving to Tofino, or put on at a party—something atmospheric, with a good groove, sonic and lyrical texture, that can be listened to over and over.”

And No Nations (about the CD name, Freybe-Smith says there’s “a lot of noise going on around the world that all seems stemmed from the notion of power, borders, ownership, territory”) can indeed be listened to over and over, because it’s one heck of an album—and not just in that local-music apologist “heck of an album” way; this is, honestly, a heck of an album. It puts other local bands who found greater success to shame—this is timeless stuff, channelling the darkest of ’80s pop and adding a modern edge. Were there justice in the music industry, this disc would find the Jets a lot of success. But there isn’t and—despite their last release, Bridges, garnering them a Juno nom—it probably won’t. And they’re alright with that.

“In all honesty we don’t walk around thinking, ‘Well, we’re better than this band so what the hell? But we’re only a little bit better than this one, and that band is so much better than us . . .’ I think the bottom line is that the music industry is a tricky, fickle, screwed-up, ever-changing, highly frustrating beast,” says Freybe-Smith. “On one level, I think bands need to be totally savvy to this and be prepared to put all their blood, sweat and tears into massaging and working that beast; on another level, you need to shut your eyes to it all and just make and appreciate music.”

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Jets Overhead
(with the Dears and Black Diamond Bay)
9pm Friday, May 29
Sugar, 858 Yates
Tickets $18 • 250-920-9950