"Radlands," the title track from Mystery Jets' latest album, is an epic piece of music and writing that feels like something that would have come out of a Larry McMurtry novel, as if it were describing the thoughts of a character from "Lonesome Dove," or someone contemplating mortality in a setting that's all sky and open land. It's a piece of declaration and it's a chance to fork in the sour taste, then to spit it out. It's a meaningful patch of prose that reads just as well on paper as it does, heard in the song, written by Henry Harrison and sung by his son Blaine Harrison. "Radlands" could be coming out of a land or a civilization that's been torn apart by fighting - with characters that are resigned to the idea that they're going to have to go off to battle, but there's little alternative. The one that they come up with is grabbing an old pistol and heading for the hills, hoping that heaven - even if it is an "overrated, horseshit shaped hole in the sky" - comes down to them.
Blaine Harrison sings:
"I've heard there's a place where we go to die
It's a terribly overrated horse-shit shaped hole in the sky
Kick off your heels and come with me tonight
And we'll pack up your car and we'll board up the house
And we'll die for our country though it never loved us
And it didn't need us these wonderful wonderful people
We'll redefine love in these papers and cry
So may the bridges we burn light the way
Out of the darkness of where we have been
Though at times it may feel like a lie
We both know nothing is quite as it seems
When the debris comes falling from the sky
Heaven will still be ours
Load up Old Bill's twelve-gauge and meet me by the lake
There's a place I know where nobody goes down by the old interstate
The future gets shorter the longer we wait
So let's step on the gas and if they come to find us
We'll run to the hills they say hills never loved us
But since we were children these wonderful wonderful people
We'll redefine love on our tombstones and cry
But someone will get all the glory
But I'll have yours and you'll have mine, you'll have mine."