MONDO JET SET ~ HA HA HA

Here's an exciting UK band that does not bother about current musical trends - and thank goodness for that. Mondo Jet Set, aka James Laming and Mark Robins, has music that is frankly so out of step with what's popular in the United Kingdom's indie music scene that it cannot fail to be anything but refreshing. Not so easily pigeonholed, the best way to understand where Mondo Jet Set is coming from is more an appreciation of the iconoclastic British geniuses of the past. If you like Syd Barrett, Nick Drake, John Lennon, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Robyn Hitchcock and Martin Newell, and value tasteful and thoughtful arrangements as well as production, then you will love Ha Ha Ha, and the gorgeous beauties found within, such as 'I Danced in a Secular Fashion', 'Girl Overrated', 'Funny Ha Ha, Bed Sitting Room' and the melancholic 'Life After Alex?'. Essential listening.

Reviewed at Today by Kevin Mathews, SINGAPORE

Mondo Jet Set is the duo comprised of former Garfields Birthday member James Laming and Mark Robins. Their third album (following an earlier effort when they were known as Marlowe) delivers another set of quirky pop tunes, beginning with the martial stomp and Spanish-style guitar interludes of ‘The Heart Refused to Budge’, then prancing around the room on the back of a whistling introduction to title track (of sorts) ‘Funny Ha Ha, Bed Sitting Room’. This one could fool the staunchest Luna fan into thinking that the pair found this in a box full of Dean Wareham’s discarded ideas. Accordions, glockenspiels, brass, and kazoos interject themselves in the oddest places and fit perfectly within their surroundings, while more traditional noisemakers like piano, bass, and guitar weave magical spells around literate, if occasionally obtuse lyrics that name check Lou Reed and Mark Smith.

‘I Danced in a Secular Fashion’ is a warm, nostalgic ballad that fondly mixes the best of Belle & Sebastian with the dearly beloved Sarah imprint and the mournful instrumental ‘The Shame of Clive’ tugs at the heartstrings like the last sunset of the summer. But it’s not a maudlin album – the collection of charming tunes and endearing vocals is economically produced with an air of vintage Simon & Garfunkel, who might’ve done wonders with ‘Girl Overrated’, which, along with ‘My Life After Alex’ suggest the lads may be recovering from a personal loss. If this is their exorcism, they’ve managed to create a musical eulogy that should be cradled to the bosom and cherished as much as their departed friend.

Reviewed at Terrascope Online by Jeff Penczak, UK

SOUNDS LIKE? Hip swinging, riff jagging casuality. Pop nonchalance a go-go. It's a sad reflection on the current state of pop music that we have to go back far enough to invoke Peter Sarsted and The Leighton Buzzards as the obvious companions to the Nick twin tower of Drake n Cave, though Pulp are in there somewhere. That's right, Mondo Jet Set are delivering pop on the Spector scale, but fear and jaunty skip along melody are right there with youth club hooks and ankst and the deadpan, dead eyed, cheery smiled, hopelessness. Maybe that's where the Pulp invocation comes from. I don't know, I just wallow in the melody, the chorus, the synapse snagging catchiness of the music and bounce back, in pop shock, from the bleak lyrical landscapes. The ideal solution is that you listen to Ha Ha Ha yourself, that's all any review can do, just point you at the art, the shit or the product and let me make up your own mind. American viewers should just keep pulling the trigger until the noise stops. IS IT ANY GOOD? Very, ten stars and all that. Suffice to say, if you could spell quintessential and I knew what it meant, the world would be a different and better place.

Reviewed at Unpeeled by Shane O'Leary, UK

Remember when all pop music was this compact, terse and literate? No, me neither, with a few cherished exceptions. Mondo Jet Set breathe much the same rarefied garret air as The Auteurs, Momus and Pete Astor: their compositions are littered with prickly (and often bleakly hilarious) self-referential detail, yet dispensed with a debonair insouciance. They’re the sort of songs you’d sing under your breath with a cigarette dangling rakishly on your lips and a blindfold over your eyes as you faced a firing squad. Ha Ha Ha is really rather brilliant. Witness ‘Funny Ha Ha, Bed Sitting Room’ – twisted twist for irradiated atom-age school-leavers – and the rueful ‘I Danced In A Secular Fashion’, which contains a sweetly observant zinger about Lou Reed. Speaking of Reed, ‘Ancient Green Carpet’ and ‘Jin’ paint a suffocating picture of dysmorphic domesticity that wouldn’t be out of place on side two of Berlin – were it not for the Mondos’ Wildean wit.

Reviewed in Happening Magazine by Marco Rossi, UK

There are two final and very different albums sitting in my ‘in tray’ from the Pink Hedgehog label: the first by Mondo Jet Set who kick off their latest album Ha Ha Ha with the tango beat of ‘The Heart Refused To Budge’, a hard hitting song that reminded me of the direct approach formerly taken by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. There are 12 songs in all of regret, longing, nostalgia (my two favourites ‘These Houses’ - clever lyric - and ‘The 1970’s’ - great chorus) and desperation (‘Ancient Green Carpet’), tinged with optimism. The music is not progressive rock, more intelligent-pop but sufficiently retro sounding (especially in the echoing piano and ringing guitars) and inventive (‘Beautiful Swing’ - with brass no less) to interest lovers of good music.

Reviewed in Acid Dragon by Phil Jackson, FRANCE