Up until the point of its release, the most rewarding aspect to Arctic Monkeys' sixth album Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino had been the hilarious unveiling of their visual aesthetic, a misfired attempt at dandyism that merely resulted in them resembling a bunch of recently-divorced Basingstoke solicitors who like to meet for occasional nights of poker, cheap cigars and grouching. It fed my fear that the band might finally be at best a busted flush, lost in the gak-the-lads posturing most depressingly revealed in that boorish Spin interview with Alex Turner and his pal, bin man of the indie landfill Miles Kane, two years ago.
It's now five years since the release of the QOTSA and hip hop inspired AM, a gap that few groups have the luxury of taking these days. That, and all indications noted above, suggested that Arctic Monkeys were about to take the first ship to Planet Hubris, a place that, unlike nearly all of their predecessors or peers in the curious realm of fairly blokey indie rock, they've commendably avoided. Now based in Los Angeles, that capital of vapidity and excess that has a habit of warping English imaginations in unpleasant ways, they exist in some bizarre world where you might easily acquire the delusion that you're a modern-day Elton John, even if on a slightly lower budget - much of this record was inspired by Alex Turner being given a Steinway Vertegrand piano (they retail for upwards of eight grand) for his 30th birthday in 2016: 'I arrived back off holiday and it was sitting there,' he's said; 'The addition of the piano to this room was definitely a huge part of the making of this album, because that suddenly became the centre of it.' Thankfully, instead of bloated and arrogant wranglings with fame and fortune, this is a concise and clever record.
Although I went through a process of feeling sad too @nicky.forbes - especially when I listened to Annie Mac with Alex turner last night! 106w 1 like Reply View replies (1). Mini Mansions featuring Alex Turner - Vertigo. Making its premiere on Annie Mac's debut Radio 1 show, Shura has shared her new single '2Shy.'. Gain access to exclusive interviews with. During a recent interview with Rolling Stone, the 30-year-old rocker admitted he hasn't found relationships easy, but thought his time with the model, 28, has been 'like a new chapter'. Annie Mac Interviews Alex Turner For Radio 1. I love how Alex brings up how he remembers some old records taking the listener on a trip to another.
From the first moment it's abundantly clear that this is a very different Arctic Monkeys album from any that have gone before. It's present via the self-awareness in Alex Turner's opening lines of 'Star Treatment' - 'I just wanted to be one of The Strokes / Now look at the mess you made me make / Hitchhiking with a monogrammed suitcase'. Suddenly the tailoring on those photos makes a hell of a lot of a sense, the perfect visual foil to this wonderfully ridiculous and smooth lounge-influenced corker, with its tinkling refrains and rattling drums and falsetto backing vocals. 'I went a little too wild in the 70s,' he sings. Alex Turner is 32.
It sets the tone for a strange and hugely enjoyable album, as meticulously crafted and at times as outré as the architectural model of the fantasy leisure resort of the title pictured on the cover. Apparently Turner made this himself, cutting and shaping cardboard and covering a room with the debris, a pleasingly eccentric new example of a musician trying to cope with fame and ego via highly-focussed activity. Perhaps in building the elaborate structure, and writing the songs to soundtrack it, Turner constructed a destination to where he could ship some of his less pleasant tendencies.
Wondering if this is in part a form of celebritherapy or atonement for past bellendery aside, the mood set on 'Star Treatment' continues on second track 'One Point Perspective', which opens, 'Dancing in my underpants / I'm gonna run for government / I'm gonna form a covers band'. It's at that point that Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino starts to make me think of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds at their most performative, slitheringly masculine and daft, or a Grinderman who got off in a wipe-clean cocktail bar rather than a rock & roll dive. There's the same insouciance, craftiness, and leer. Lyrically too Turner's lyricism of batteries running low thanks to video calls with God, 'Jesus in a day spa' and a 'prophetic esplanade' is increasingly Cavean in feel. His wit is sharper than before, especially when it veers into #AccidentalPartridge territory: 'Technological advances / Really bloody get me in the mood', he sings on the title track. Create bootable mac drive.
It's that song that nicely shows off James Ford's production as superb, dextrous and light. Piano, drums and a playful, more experimental sonic palette throughout make a fine bed for Turner's increasingly expressive vocals. He defies physics and common senses of perspective and lechery, warbling and hooting 'kiss me underneath the moon's side booooOOOOOooooob', again on 'Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino'. Curiously, this song is just one of many moments on the album where it feels as if they've picked up the mantle, lyrical, vocal and musical, from their dearly-missed Domino labelmates Wild Beasts.
It's now five years since the release of the QOTSA and hip hop inspired AM, a gap that few groups have the luxury of taking these days. That, and all indications noted above, suggested that Arctic Monkeys were about to take the first ship to Planet Hubris, a place that, unlike nearly all of their predecessors or peers in the curious realm of fairly blokey indie rock, they've commendably avoided. Now based in Los Angeles, that capital of vapidity and excess that has a habit of warping English imaginations in unpleasant ways, they exist in some bizarre world where you might easily acquire the delusion that you're a modern-day Elton John, even if on a slightly lower budget - much of this record was inspired by Alex Turner being given a Steinway Vertegrand piano (they retail for upwards of eight grand) for his 30th birthday in 2016: 'I arrived back off holiday and it was sitting there,' he's said; 'The addition of the piano to this room was definitely a huge part of the making of this album, because that suddenly became the centre of it.' Thankfully, instead of bloated and arrogant wranglings with fame and fortune, this is a concise and clever record.
Although I went through a process of feeling sad too @nicky.forbes - especially when I listened to Annie Mac with Alex turner last night! 106w 1 like Reply View replies (1). Mini Mansions featuring Alex Turner - Vertigo. Making its premiere on Annie Mac's debut Radio 1 show, Shura has shared her new single '2Shy.'. Gain access to exclusive interviews with. During a recent interview with Rolling Stone, the 30-year-old rocker admitted he hasn't found relationships easy, but thought his time with the model, 28, has been 'like a new chapter'. Annie Mac Interviews Alex Turner For Radio 1. I love how Alex brings up how he remembers some old records taking the listener on a trip to another.
From the first moment it's abundantly clear that this is a very different Arctic Monkeys album from any that have gone before. It's present via the self-awareness in Alex Turner's opening lines of 'Star Treatment' - 'I just wanted to be one of The Strokes / Now look at the mess you made me make / Hitchhiking with a monogrammed suitcase'. Suddenly the tailoring on those photos makes a hell of a lot of a sense, the perfect visual foil to this wonderfully ridiculous and smooth lounge-influenced corker, with its tinkling refrains and rattling drums and falsetto backing vocals. 'I went a little too wild in the 70s,' he sings. Alex Turner is 32.
It sets the tone for a strange and hugely enjoyable album, as meticulously crafted and at times as outré as the architectural model of the fantasy leisure resort of the title pictured on the cover. Apparently Turner made this himself, cutting and shaping cardboard and covering a room with the debris, a pleasingly eccentric new example of a musician trying to cope with fame and ego via highly-focussed activity. Perhaps in building the elaborate structure, and writing the songs to soundtrack it, Turner constructed a destination to where he could ship some of his less pleasant tendencies.
Wondering if this is in part a form of celebritherapy or atonement for past bellendery aside, the mood set on 'Star Treatment' continues on second track 'One Point Perspective', which opens, 'Dancing in my underpants / I'm gonna run for government / I'm gonna form a covers band'. It's at that point that Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino starts to make me think of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds at their most performative, slitheringly masculine and daft, or a Grinderman who got off in a wipe-clean cocktail bar rather than a rock & roll dive. There's the same insouciance, craftiness, and leer. Lyrically too Turner's lyricism of batteries running low thanks to video calls with God, 'Jesus in a day spa' and a 'prophetic esplanade' is increasingly Cavean in feel. His wit is sharper than before, especially when it veers into #AccidentalPartridge territory: 'Technological advances / Really bloody get me in the mood', he sings on the title track. Create bootable mac drive.
It's that song that nicely shows off James Ford's production as superb, dextrous and light. Piano, drums and a playful, more experimental sonic palette throughout make a fine bed for Turner's increasingly expressive vocals. He defies physics and common senses of perspective and lechery, warbling and hooting 'kiss me underneath the moon's side booooOOOOOooooob', again on 'Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino'. Curiously, this song is just one of many moments on the album where it feels as if they've picked up the mantle, lyrical, vocal and musical, from their dearly-missed Domino labelmates Wild Beasts.
On 'Golden Trunks' (perhaps my favourite song title thus far in 2018), 'One Point Perspective' and 'Four Out Of Five' the pugnacious guitar of yore is still present, but gives flavour rather than dominates, like a good bit of fatty marbling in a premium steak. The latter track becomes a glorious, soaring pop ballad devoted to the gentrification of space and leaving user reviews of intergalactic upscale leisure emporia. Insert image preview mac.
'She Looks Like Fun' and 'Batphone' hark back to territories previously covered by the band, puncturing the end of the record slightly, but the drunken end-night slow-jam of the aptly-named 'The Ultracheese' makes for a pleasing final flourish. This is by far and away the most charming, enjoyable and progressive album that the Arctic Monkeys have made and bodes well for a pretty interesting future, if only Turner could try and send the Last Shadow Puppets to the giant Punch & Judy Show in the sky. Quadranto 1 4 1. The Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino appears to be a place where it'd not be too bad to spend some time, even if I maintain that the dress code is preposterous.
Alex Turner Interview Annie Mackenzie
This is a story about sex, drugs and Josh Homme. If you could regularly get that combination in your own life, you'd be living well. When they first emerged, Arctic Monkeys were writing songs that observed their generation with a squinting eye and a curled lip. Now they're living it.
Unlike Oasis, arguably their prototype, Arctic Monkeys have kept moving and evolved as most of their indie peers have stagnated and fallen behind. This is in part because their influences came not just from The Smiths and Stone Roses, but also from hip hop, John Cooper Clarke and Alan Sillitoe. https://timiragtern1986.wixsite.com/fardownload/post/mac-premiere-cc. This gave a sense that the Arctic Monkeys are rooted in a very British experience, with broad tastes that elevated them above the lad hordes while enabling the development of their own aesthetic.
They've also managed to avoid many of the pitfalls that did for Oasis. In the early rush of their success, it was clear that Arctic Monkeys were neither comfortable with their fame nor able to really capitalise on it. They treated interviews with bemusement and barely phoned it in at awards ceremonies, yet it wasn't smugness or aloofness, nor an affected 'ordinary blokes' act.
Alex Turner Interview Annie Macmillan
Early albums Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not and Favourite Worst Nightmare were the work of a band still in the grip of adolescence. Like Eric Hobsbawm's long nineteenth century – stretching from 1789 to 1914 – modern teenagerdom ends up drawn out. Most people don't shake it off until they're 25, or even later. Arctic Monkeys had a catalyst to speed up the reaction, to fizz them into a darker, groovier place. That catalyst was named Josh Homme, and as burly midwife for 2009's Humbug he helped get these adolescents in touch with their hairier, hornier, harsher core.
If 2011's Suck It And See was a sweet treat for fans, AM is like finding your popping candy has been mixed with amphetamine. Hints of the band's love of hip hop had been scattered in basslines, drum beats and lyrics since their debut, but on the new album they've finally come to the fore. 'R U Mine' arrived with the kind of bassline Dre would happily sample the shit out of, and then came 'Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High?', which has enough swagger to make a young LL Cool J jealous.
AM is a record of late nights and drinking. It's a galaxy away from the simple jealousies of an early b-side like 'Bigger Boys And Stolen Sweethearts'. This is an album made by men in their late twenties, men who are still trying to get a handle on all the fun they can have and all the disaster it can cause. For instance, the subject of 'Arabella' sounds like naughty sort: 'Arabella has some interstellar ‘gator skin boots and a helter-skelter in her little finger and I ride it endlessly…' [surely Turner is singing the joys of a prostate tickle here? - ED] The tale is driven along by Josh Homme guitars and a sinister groove.
Across AM you constantly brush up against the sound of a band unafraid to mess with the template, to call in friends to throw guitar onto track - as with the contributions of hugely inventive former Coral guitarist Bill Ryder Jones - while elsewhere Homme and Peter Thomas also play sidemen. If the mooted prospect of Haim doing the backing vocals had come to pass it would have been sweet icing on an already delicious thing. Still, Turner, Helders, Cook and O'Malley make a great fist of the high harmonies on their own. 'One For The Road' is cut-and-shut off Queens Of The Stone Age-style rock menace, the vocals near falsetto.
Similarly surprising vocal takes abound on 'Mad Sounds', which throws them singing low in a bustling mix of guitar, doo-wop backing vocals and references to the Rolling Stones' '2000 Light Years From Home'. The same 'shoo wop shoo wops' are found on 'Fireside'. Someone had a barbershop compilation in the studio! https://latintorrent.mystrikingly.com/blog/how-to-download-fnaf-ar. 'Snap Out Of It' has clicks, claps and the kind of catchy hooks that'll get you a job pumping out new songs for Icona Pop. Pleasing new lyrical conceits seem to float out from the bundle of sounds with every listen. Alex Turner throws out more bon mots in one track that most bands manage on a whole record. Apple final cut pro x crack.
Though hip-hop and R&B are the most striking influences on AM, the tang of rockabilly and 50s crooners that weaved through previous Arctic Monkeys albums is also there. 'No. 1 Party Anthem' – a bit of a Katy Perry title – has crooning written through it like a stick of rock - all that hanging out with Richard Hawley and Turner's busman's holiday in Last Shadow Puppets has had a lasting effect. Similarly, on 'I Wanna Be Yours', the band's reading of John Cooper Clarke's 1984 poem – older than all the band members – turns the fast syllable splat into a slinking seduction. It's an honour that Clarke richly deserved.
But of all the songs and moments on AM that signpost the inventiveness and evolution of Arctic Monkeys, it's the seedy slink of 'Knee Socks' that is most striking. The penultimate track on the record, it begins as a enjoyable stomp but curls and collapses in on itself, descending into an R&B-influenced breakdown in the middle that recalls close harmony groups like BlackStreet more than any indie band of the past 30 years.
Alex Turner has gone from the clever boy who could spin a great chat up line to a man with what a former flatmate of mine called 'throw down'. Proper drugs and dirty sex have set the demonic heart of the Arctic Monkeys and boy howdy, that's a cause for celebration. Now, I'm not for a moment suggesting that Alex Turner is diving into naked Jenga every night and taking more drugs than a touring funk band – as Mclusky sang it – but if he is, he's shagging the right people and taking the right drugs.
The sexuality at the heart of AM is best typified by what could be called the Question Song Trilogy: 'Do I Wanna Know?', 'RU Mine?' and 'Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High?' Whether or not the band deliberately created the trio of questioning songs or came to them by accident, they share key ingredients – lyrics with more cheek than a walrus in hot pants, heavy, hip-hop influenced basslines, and riffs so huge you'd need professional climbing gear to scale them. High sierra mac air. The Arctic Monkeys have comprehensively slaked off their PG-13 pretensions and gone full-on X-rated.
