Jettison real estate license#
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a concept album, see - a loose one, maybe, but still - and, that being the case, also a license for getting out of Turner’s usual lyrical, um, orbit. Now is probably as good a time as any to note that the hot new property his narrator’s shilling for isn’t on this planet it’s on the moon, “around Clavius” to be precise, with the “exodus” referring to a speculative and apparently very literal kind of white flight.
Since the exodus it’s all getting gentrified
Even the grooviest-sounding thing here, “Four Out of Five,” turns out to be a Trojan horse for Turner’s mordant irony as he plays dubious real estate pitchman:
Jettison real estate full#
was a slickly assured unit-shifter the new album’s chockablock with self-lacerating lyrics (“I’m so full of shite,” e.g.) and meandering, irresolute melodic lines. Tranquility Base is as cagey and anxious as A.M. , here those elements work toward far different ends. The track, “Star Treatment,” will go on to posit an alternate-universe version of Turner: a frontman who was “a little too wild in the Seventies” (the actual frontman was nowhere near alive for that decade) and who presently finds himself crashing “back down to Earth with a lounge-singer shimmer/Elevator down to my make-believe residency from the honeymoon suite/Two shows a day, four nights a week/Easy money.” Or maybe that’s the psychic state in which the real Turner now finds himself, his band’s heady early days well in the rearview as he reckons with having softened the group’s approach in search of a sort of broad palatability, one that still didn’t get him quite where he’d hoped to be.īut while the downtempo arrangements - and relative absence of any sound for which sawtooth might seem a fitting descriptor - may mark this new batch as of a superficial piece with A.M.
“Now look at the mess you’ve made me make/Hitchhiking with a monogrammed suitcase/Miles away from any half-useful imaginary highway.” “I just wanted to be one of the Strokes,” he intones. Meanwhile, there continues to be a vocal contingent in the fan base here - call it the backward-hatted faction - clamoring for a return to the snottier, more aggro “early stuff.” Arctic Monkeys can’t win for losing.Īccordingly, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino begins with the sound of lead man Alex Turner tossing up his hands as to what’s liable to stick in a country as savagely fickle as ours. went platinum this side of the pond, getting Arctic Monkeys as bigly exposed as a sold-out night at MSG, but still failed to make theirs a household name stateside. market, with respect to which their success has been a mixed bag. We’re given to understand this had something to do with cracking the tough-nut U.S. Across that span, you’d have noticed less and less of the often punishing pace and oddball serrated riffage that had been the band’s early stock-in-trade, with the boys seeming bound and determined to bevel out and lacquer over their formerly jagged little thrills. smash Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, which gave way to the more polished but equally pummeling Favourite Worst Nightmare (2007), which begat the brooding self-doubt of Humbug (2009), the crooned pop balladry of 2011’s Suck It and See, the locked grooves of 2013’s A.M. It’s not that left-field, more the latest stage in an evolution going all the way back: to the clattering bar fights of their debut, the 2006 U.K.
One counts the days till some clever wag dubs the new Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino the band’s Kid A. The story of Arctic Monkeys’ career to date being that of a gradual gentling in their guitar attack, the logical end point was an album with hardly any guitars or attack at all.
0 kommentar(er)
