(Domino Records)
Alex Turner’s vocals are majestic on this retro-styled, tactile album that delves into the effort behind maintaining a glamorous facade
When Arctic Monkeys sprang into the charts 16 years ago, they did so with a hurtling energy and an album name borrowed from Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. At the time, the band’s lead singer, Alex Turner, explained their reasoning: the record’s stories were similarly drawn from the threshold of the weekend – one foot in the hopeful glamour of the previous night, the other in the plain reality of the morning after. In the years since, it’s been hard not to also regard the title of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not as a statement of creative intent: a desire to buck musical expectation, to not repeat whatever came before. Across six albums the band have moved wilfully from indie to rock to funk to, on their last outing – 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, a collection of songs that married Serge Gainsbourg and the Beach Boys.
That Sillitoe spirit carries through to the band’s seventh album, The Car, a record that returns us to that Janus-like space in which Turner’s songwriting thrives, and performs yet another stylistic flip. Produced by James Ford, who has worked with the band since their second record, Favourite Worst Nightmare, this time the sound is largely strings, sultriness, honeyed soul, Turner taking the lounge singer tradition and twisting it this way and that. For all the retro stylings, the effect is surprisingly contemporary, the lushness tempered by something sour and dark: the electronic growl that opens Sculptures of Anything Goes, the twinkling lope beneath Body Paint, the tension between the wah wah guitars of Jet Skis on the Moat and the mundanity of Turner’s lyrics. “Are you just happy to sit there,” he wonders flatly, “and watch while the paint job dries?”
