Over the last few weeks, I’ve been gathering the contents of my life together in order to move house, and it’s a complete bitch; the heavy lifting, the organising and reorganising, the increasing sense of sickness at the sight of everything you own. The lack of internet hardly helps – in the interest of full disclosure, I’m writing this review from the comfort of a local coffee shop, like some sort of slacker Carrie Bradshaw. I mention this mundane slice of Twitto-biography to make a tenuous link to the record this article is ostensibly reviewing; Serotonin, Mystery Jets’ third album, is their first since they upped sticks and moved from 679′s major-label-offshoot hell to the plush confines of R­­ough Trade, and in the process of this upheaval, they seem to have reassessed what makes them who they are and become just as sick of everything they hold dear as I currently am.

The album starts promisingly enough with the contorted devotional ‘Alice Springs’, which sees Blaine Harrison deliver one of his most impassioned choruses – “I’d stand in the line of fire for you! I’d bend over backwards for you!” – over a motorik beat, Africanthemic backing chants and some wonderfully spidery guitars. Unfortunately, it charges into the album’s, and indeed the band’s, nadir, ‘Too Late to Talk’, an embarrassing slowie of Westlife proportions (stand up for the key change!) that goes on too long to make it seem like be anything other than painfully sincere.

The freak flag flies at its highest on the swaggering ‘Flash a Hungry Smile’, which could have come straight from Making Dens – all kazoos, whistles, bells, and a particularly endearing couplet about how “the birds and the bees have all caught STDs.” The title track, which follows in hot pursuit of ‘Flash’, is a sassy disco anthem, smothered in sexy whispered vocals (oddly reminiscent of Corona’s Europop classic ‘Rhythm of the Night’) and a nagging synth hook, the only track here that remodels ‘Two Doors Down’, but does it right. Meanwhile on the softer side, ‘Waiting on a Miracle’ opens like The Cure at their most squallingly Pornographic, before sliding into a pounding heartbreaker, and closer ‘Lorna Doone’ is an epic thumping ballad of Saharan proportions, which ends the album on a dignified high.

Most of the quirks that made the band’s first two LPs so appealing are all but banished, replaced by a gloss and a sheen (surely thanks in no small part to Pulp/Sex Pistols producer Chris Thomas) that ill fits them. ‘Two Doors Down’, the main talking point of the effortlessly great Twenty One, deserved its status because it was an exceptional track in both senses of the word: a perfectly-composed pop gem – at once an irreverent yet loving genre exercise/pastiche of the best and worst in eighties pop, right down to the inclusion of a sax solo, but one that worked outside of the pre-conceived notion of what the band’s Eel Pie Island freakery was all about. Unfortunately, Serotonin seems to have adopted ‘Doors’ as its template, with tracks like ‘Dreaming of Another World’, ‘The Girl Is Gone’ and ‘Show Me the Light’ all aping, and consequently negating, all that was special about that song in the first place.

With Serotonin, Mystery Jets have delivered an upbeat, well-produced third record, just in time for summer consumption. Unfortunately, it occasionally seems a little too calculated, too impersonal, too damn mediocre to be anywhere near as transcendent as the rest of their material and, as such, has them occasionally sounding like Just Another Indie Band for the first time in their career.

Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got some more unpacking to do…