“I said are you gonna be my girl?”

I’m pretty sure that anyone existing in the 2000s instantly has the Jet song, Are You Gonna Be My Girl stuck in their head after reading that line. How could you not? The song was so outrageously popular, gritty, and catchy that it instantly became a hit the moment it was released on the airwaves.

This same song single handedly drew me to buy the album on a complete whim from Monster Pawn. I figured if the one song could be that enjoyable than surely the rest of the album would likely be much of the same!

The patron saint of used compact discs was smiling fondly on me that day.

Besides Are You Gonna Be My Girl, three other songs were released as singles; Cold Hard Bitch, Rollover DJ, and Look What You’ve Done, each being instantly recognizable even though I never knew the song titles and each being amazing tracks.

There is such a dominant classic rock vibe to the songs here and makes the album just that more enjoyable. The slower tracks, which are easily identifiable as belonging to present-day alternative rock as opposed to sounding classic rock-ish, are still equally enjoyable and provide a nice barrier and breathing room for the more action-packed songs.

It’s such a shame that more songs from this album weren’t released as singles, although I could see why. The heavy songs all kinda sound alike and all the slower tracks resemble one another when you aren’t listening to the album as in-depth as I did. Did this matter to me? Did this affect my final score? Normally it would and on any other album it would have become draining after a while. For whatever reason, that fails to be a problem here, as if Jet was slowly carving a niche and specific sound for themselves.

Take AC/DC for example; all of their songs kind of sound the same and yet as soon as you hear the first guitar chord or drum hit that it is an AC/DC song. The same goes for the Jet songs heard here. Unfortunately for the band, they seem doomed to be cursed with sounding like every Budweiser commercial ever.

A good album nonetheless, especially if you need a good driving album to throw into your car (I would if I had a car…) or want to have a party just like those you see in all the beer commercials with the gentle setting sun, hot girls, buff guys, and endless cut shots of people not drinking beer (the commercials never show people consuming the alcohol. College taught me that one!). This one’s plenty enjoyable, with or without the beer goggle headphones on.

Final score: 4/5