Arctic Monkeys: AM

ARCTIC MONKEYS: AM (2013)

1) Do I Wanna Know; 2) R U Mine; 3) One For The Road; 4) Arabella; 5) I Want It All; 6) No. 1 Party Anthem; 7) Mad Sounds; 8) Fireside; 9) Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High; 10) Snap Out Of It; 11) Knee Socks; 12) I Wanna Be Yours.

Either I am getting dangerously used to this band, or this is not only the best Arctic Monkeys album ever, but the first real, authentic proof of why these guys did need to get together in the first place, even if took them seven years to finally whip it out. I have no idea what happened. Maybe they all sat down, took a long time to think, ponder over the responsibility that undeser­vedly gained fame and fortune piles upon the aspiring artist, then took a solemn vow not to leave the studio until the «no-filler» principle reached a Beatlesque level. Not that the songs are in any way Beatlesque as such. They are simply all good, and it puzzles me.

Atmosphere-wise, AM once again cuts down on aggressive rock'n'roll and returns to the moody darkness of Humbug (see ʽMy Propellerʼ and all that follows), but this time, the darkness has been shaped and beaten into a much more precise form — presuming memorable riffs and evoca­tive choruses, not to mention some very clever use of vocal harmonies. As if to state that they no longer plant their trust in bashing the hell out of everything, ʽDo I Wanna Know?ʼ opens the re­cord with the sound of a drum machine, which could just as easily have been a regular drum part, but the song is not about drumming — it is about a dark night setting where the protagonist, drunk, bitter, depressed, but still retaining some cool, reflects on whether there is still a chance at reconnecting with his other half, and it works astonishingly well, with the feeling perfectly ex­pressed by the melodic hard riffage and the contrast between Turner's irritated, sarcastic solo parts in the verses and the group's choir harmonies on the "Crawling back to you..." chorus.

Pretty much the same mood permeates the rest of the tracks, so that the entire album shares this nocturnal mood — not a dreamy, romantic, candle-lit night, but a bit of a werewolfish one, ex­acerbated by way too many cups of coffee, cigarettes, and self-revving-up into a state of rather inexplainable nervous tension. No other tune gets this more right than ʽArabellaʼ. Starts out quietly, grim syncopated bassline against lonesome guitar howls and hoots, then rapidly switches to «Sabbath» mode for a threatening bridge where Turner's singing is performed in a call-and-response pattern with the heavy guitar riff rather than in complete tandem with it, and this helps make both sides more imposing. Technically, it's a love song, with Alex serenading a mystical lady who "got a Seventies' head, but she's a modern lover" — but arranged as a complex heavy rocker, giving a fairly brutal edge to the romance.

Another excellent example — the aptly titled ʽFiresideʼ, but, again, it's not about cuddling down by the fireside, it's about how "Isn't it hard to make up your mind / When you're losing / And your fuse is fireside?": a tense, paranoid rocker, driven mostly by acoustic guitar, which keeps ringing out like an alarm system. The devil is in the tiny details — such as, for instance, the extra alarm signal from the organ that gets turned on just as Alex switches tonality on the third line of the verse. This sudden attention to subtle detail, or, at least, to meaningful and immediately notice­able sudden detail, is really a new turn for the Monkeys, as is a penchant for cleverer, ticklier riffs — check out ʽKnee Socksʼ with its poppy melody, sounding a little like Suzanne Vega with dis­tortion, or the martial grunt of ʽI Want It Allʼ, which echoes Sabbath's ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ, but with a psychedelic twist instead of an apocalyptic one (with falsetto choruses and colorfully tinged lead guitar melting your mind against the heavy riffage).

When they start sentimentalizing the mood and slowing things down, nothing disastrous happens, either: ʽNo. 1 Party Anthemʼ goes a bit too heavy on the "come on come on come on" refrain, but the arrangement, the singing, and the vocal resolution of the chorus all gamble on «grand» and end up winning the pot. On ʽMad Soundsʼ, they try their hand at the good old R&B formula, and, astonishingly, it also works — with a long, subtle buildup to the "ooh la la la"'s of the chorus, which they ironically play upon in the lyrics: "...you just can't figure out what went wrong / Then out of nowhere, somebodcy comes and hits you with a... / Ooh la la la, ooh la la la...".

Of course, the Arctic Monkeys had been a «midnight-oriented» band from the very start. And, of course, the Arctic Monkeys never had, and still do not have, any grand, all-penetrating artistic vision that could shake the foundations of one's existence. They started out as relatively shallow hipsters, way too bent on proving their cool to have much time left for anything else. But if AM (their best album title so far, by the way), with its one-track orientation, does not pretend to sol­ving the problems of the universe any more than its predecessors, there is at least nothing shal­lowly-hipsterish about it any longer, or, at the very least, they have learned to make music that can be enjoyed by a much wider audience than «cool people for the sake of coolness». Jealous lovers, pissed-off losers, old-school power pop and hard rock fans, all of those and other catego­ries of listeners are bound to find something in common with the spirit of these tunes.

Whether this enthusiastic thumbs up is going to be an accidental exception or the start of a new, mature band cannot be predicted, but I am fairly sure that this new «midnight rock» formula is viable and, with the appropriate effort, could be advanced to even further heights. Another album like this and I might be joining Gordon Brown on account of this band.

Check "AM" (CD) on Amazon
Check "AM" (MP3) on Amazon

Arctic Monkeys: Suck It And See

THE ARCTIC MONKEYS: SUCK IT AND SEE (2011)

1) She's Thunderstorms; 2) Black Treacle; 3) Brick By Brick; 4) The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala; 5) Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair; 6) Library Pictures; 7) All My Own Stunts; 8) Reckless Serenade; 9) Piledriver Waltz; 10) Love Is A Laserquest; 11) Suck It And See; 12) That's Where You're Wrong.

The band's fourth consecutive No. 1 album in the UK continues to prove that The Arctic Mon­keys are a brute force to be reckoned with, but why that is is still anybody's guess. Seems like everybody loves these guys anyway, so why in the hell bother explaining what it is they set out to accomplish in the first place? Just suck it, brother, and you'll see. (The title, by the way, comes from a grafitti in Clockwork Orange, and had the luck of getting censored over with a sticker in some corners of the world, further increasing its popularity).

Musically, it is sort of a «return to roots», or, rather, a dialectical synthesis of the Monkeys' initial style with the artsy-intellectual excesses of Humbug. The songs are generally more immediate and, quantitatively, kick a larger square area of ass than the previous time, but Turner's lyrics and ways of delivering them are, if possible, even more convoluted and «mysterious»: gone for good are the days of focusing on local nighttime hipster culture — the Humbug way of grimly delive­ring pseudo-messages has so pleased the man that he has fixed it permanently.

To be fair, about half of these songs seem to be love confessions, written on a perilous quest for the Ultimate Metaphor — you know, the one that is sitting locked high up in the tower guarded by fire-breathing Clichés and Embarrassments. For the most part, Turner does well on the quest, contributing neat little touches that do not always register upon first listen/consideration. Like, for instance, just how much «neater» is the song title/chorus 'She's Thunderstorms' than 'She's Like A Thunderstorm'? Or how often do you tell your partner that "your love is like a studded leather headlock... you're rarer than a can of dandelion and burdock"?

On the other hand, everyone is engaging in original metaphors these days, stretching the abilities of language as far as they can be stretched (and they still are stretchable). But does it go hand-in-hand with great music? Not exactly. By this time, the general style of the Monkeys is recogni­zable, but their ability to come up with first-rate pop riffs is still close to zero: 'Brick By Brick', a psycho-garage monster oozing «ringing brutality» with mathematical precision, is the only song to have made a lasting musical impression on me. Vocal melodies fare a little better, particularly on the more lyrical numbers like 'She's Thunderstorms' and 'Reckless Serenade', but not enough to wring out tears or anything.

The biggest ongoing problem with the Monkeys is that it is still impossible to understand just how much real bite these guys are threatening. A song like 'Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair' sounds all mean and lean, with a grumbly metal-pop riff sitting it through and Turner allowing you to "go into business with a grizzly bear" in the snottiest, snarliest tone he can put to­gether, but... is this for real? Who exactly is he flailing his fist at? His girlfriend? His record com­pany? His listeners? The Fifth Earl of Chesterfield? What is really disturbing is that it's not just the lyrics that are confusing, it is the whole way of doing it — all of the time, staying tight in con­trol, cool, calm, and collected. For a musicologist, dissecting Suck It And See may be fun, so close it is to «math-rock» in some of its jagged angles. But everyone else just gets the same old thing — an album that is too well-calculated to attract the genuine spirit of rock'n'roll, yet too bluffy and obscure for obscurity's sake to be revered on a «brainy» level.

'Brick By Brick' is fun, though. Certainly not to be missed in a world where the art of fun keeps getting re­duced to FUN FUN FUN FUN FUN.

Check "Suck It And See" (CD) on Amazon
Check "Suck It And See" (MP3) on Amazon

Arctic Monkeys: Humbug

ARCTIC MONKEYS: HUMBUG (2009)

1) My Propeller; 2) Crying Lightning; 3) Dangerous Animals; 4) Secret Door; 5) Potion Approaching; 6) Fire And The Thud; 7) Cornerstone; 8) Dance Little Liar; 9) Pretty Visitors; 10) The Jeweller's Hands.

The Monkeys have most certainly stepped on the path of evolution, and should be now dubbed the Arctic Paranthropi. Reports on Humbug have varied accordingly, from insulted cries of be­tra­yal to placated admissions of growing up. But then Alex Turner and his buddies never took the sacred AC/DC oath of forever staying true to one style, and, with their implicit claims of intel­lectuality and twenty-first century smartness, it was inevitable that sooner or later they would get bored with bare-bones rock'n'roll, no matter how multiangular they made it.

It is, however, hard to define their new direction. They slow down the tempos; bring in more of the old stu­dio tricks (echo, reverb, delay, etc.); variegate the instrumentation, throwing in organs and a bit of old-fashioned synths and even some glockenspiel; and entrust Turner with new algo­rithms to encrypt his lyrics, so that most of the time you do not have the faintest idea what they are singing about. (Detailed analysis shows they are still mostly singing about getting some, and if you listen carefully, you will be rewarded with such great hookup lines as 'Coax me out, my love, and have a spin of my propeller' and 'Yours is the only ocean that I want to swing from, yours is the only ocean that I want to hang on to'. How the heck can you swing from an ocean?).

In the end, Humbug is decidedly darker than its predecessors, who themselves were no joyfests either. Turner assumes a sinister, impenetrable stance, sucking in a mix of Ian Curtis/Nick Cave influences, and each second song is extremely bass-heavy, sometimes bordering on metallic. (Not coincidentally, one of the bonus tracks on the Japanese edition is a straightahead — and excellent — cover of Cave's 'Red Right Hand'.) But it is all very much a matter of bluff: this kind of preten­tious darkness only works when there is substance behind it. Is there?

If there is, I have yet to sense it. For the most part, it feels like a bunch of well-meaning manne­risms. The guitars howl, the bass growls, the vocalist insinuates some eerie crap, the production is all wobbly and echoey, but no matter how hard the magician's apprentice tries to master the spell, the magic just isn't there. Some songs are more memorable than others: I count stronger hooks on 'My Propeller', 'Crying Lightning', 'Potion Approaching' (the most energetic number on the al­bum), and 'Dance Little Liar', but even these could have been written by anyone. Not a single riff on here manages to shake my foundations in the slightest way possible. Not a single lyrical bit manages to convince me that they have something all their own to tell me. They just love their old heroes and they want to be like them. But they have no power to be like them.

Yes, sadly, it all means the simplest of things: the Monkeys have brains and ambitions, but very little musical talent — or, putting it more optimistically, their talents are still waiting to be shook up and awakened. Nowhere is this more evident than on the final tune: 'The Jeweller's Hands' has a long, atmospheric coda that is presumably supposed to leave the listener in an overwhelmed state of «depressed beauty», but they lack the power to pull it off properly, and all of their wailing gui­tars and melancholy choruses just go to waste. There is no reason whatsoever for anyone to vo­lun­ta­rily submit to their third-rate hypnosis. It is all too trivial. I applaud the desire to change, the escape from the pigeonhole, the smartness, the coolness. Now how about writing some good songs, guys? Thumbs down.

Arctic Monkeys: Favourite Worst Nightmare

ARCTIC MONKEYS: FAVOURITE WORST NIGHTMARE (2007)

1) Brianstorm; 2) Teddy Picker; 3) D Is For Dangerous; 4) Balaclava; 5) Fluorescent Adolescent; 6) Only Ones Who Know; 7) Do Me A Favour; 8) This House Is A Circus; 9) If You Were There, Beware; 10) The Bad Thing; 11) Old Yellow Bricks; 12) 505.

This review will not be lengthy, because I have pretty much said it all before. On their sophomore effort, the boys continue doing the same old thing — constructing brainy patterns of multi-riff sequences, setting them to sharp, but convoluted lyrics, and recording them in a Brit-pop-punk style with Jam/Blur as the backbone and randomized influences, ranging from the Smiths to Du­ran Duran, as the muscle. Please support them financially if you like this description.

Well, perhaps there is one difference: instead of writing lyrics about deadend clublife, Alex Tur­ner is now writing lyrics just about everything, from flight experiences to character assassinations to things that cannot be decoded at all. Unfortunately, there is very little about this new, conven­tion-free writing style that catches the eye, except for an occasional Duran Duran quote ('I don't want your prayers, save it for the morning after') or smarmy references to the Wizard of Oz.

Also, even though they are very intent on putting together new sets of chords rather than re­cy­cling the old ones, second time around they come up with an even lesser number of interesting sets than before — these riffs are just too smart and «mathematical» to rock out to, yet too simplistic to admire from a constructionist's point of view. Besides, they, too, have their limits; I started out seriously liking the main theme of 'Teddy Picker' — before realizing that it is merely a minor twist on the main theme of 'Fake Tales Of San Francisco'. So, intuition tells me that there is pro­bably a lot more lazy rewriting going on here than I suspect — if only I could remember what the «original» melodies on Whatever sounded like.

The two other singles were 'Brianstorm' (sic, about some guy named Brian — not Jones, just some random guy named Brian), which does sound like a storm but completely passes by me every time I put it on; and 'Fluorescent Adolescent', a very nice, but not jaw-dropping, piece of hyper-British hypersarcasm ('you used to get it in your fishnets, now you only get it in your night dress') that sounds like it could have been a stolen outtake from Blur's Parklife.

The other songs — no idea if they really deserve any special mention (e. g., many people rave about how clever it was to take an Ennio Morricone organ sample and use it as the start to '505'. DUH?) A very typical «so­phomore slump», if you ask me, but perhaps you just shouldn't ask. Thumbs down, say the brain and the heart in a quintessentially Russian situation of «tan­de­mocracy».

Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I Am Not

ARCTIC MONKEYS: WHATEVER PEOPLE SAY I AM, THAT'S WHAT I'M NOT (2006)

1) The View From The Afternoon; 2) I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor; 3) Fake Tales Of San Francisco; 4) Dancing Shoes; 5) You Probably Couldn't See For The Lights But You Were Staring Straight At Me; 6) Still Take You Home; 7) Riot Van; 8) Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secure; 9) Mardy Bum; 10) When The Sun Goes Down; 11) From The Ritz To The Rubble; 12) A Certain Romance.

In January 2006, British audiences have once again demonstrated that their average tastes are still more «rock-based» and less eroded by the onslaught of crap marketing than the average Ameri­can tastes — by spinning all the way up to No. 1 the debut album of this, still relatively little known, Sheffield band. Critical and commercial response, over a one-year period, have pretty much transformed The Arctic Monkeys into The Jam of their generation, and now it was up to the Monkeys to prove that they had something to offer history that the Jam already had not — or, perhaps, not to prove anything, but simply to fill in the old pair of shoes that, for every new gene­ration, needs to be filled in by a pair of young stinkless feet.

But I am in a little trouble here. I have never liked The Jam all that much; I liked Blur and Oasis a lit­tle bit better, but not enough to worship at their altar; and as for the band's more immediate influ­ences including The Strokes and The Libertines — the obvious question is, what kind of space are these influences actually leaving this new band to stand out on its own?

No space at all, except for the kind of space that is inevitably provided by the passing of time. Alex Turner (lead vocals, guitar, lyrics), Jamie Cook (guitar), Nick O'Malley (bass), and Matt Helders (drums) are a bunch of kids who grew up in 1990s Britain, and are obviously reflecting 1990s Britain (they are also quite obviously influenced by older music, which they freely admit, but it is safe to assume they grew up on Blur rather than Beatles). They are young, moderately intelligent — the moderate way you'd expect from a bunch of middle-class Sheffield kids — and very, very relevant. So relevant, in fact, that even Gordon Brown had to admit to liking them (say­ing something along the lines of 'they really wake you up in the morning' and sending the whole nation up in hysteria at the thought of the Right Honourable MP hopping in the direction of the bathroom to the bright sounds of 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor').

If it is still possible, today, to make interesting music with bass, drums, and two electric guitars with no special effects, then The Arctic Monkeys make interesting music, or at least honestly try to. Their style is «punk pop», with an occasional outburst or two of outside influences like ska, and they are constantly looking for unusual riffs, time signature varieties even within two-minute long songs, and non-trivial decisions for the vocal hooks. Of course, there is never any guarantee that these riffs and hooks are completely fresh — any major connoisseur of punk and pop will be able to trace these elements back thirty years — but, just like The Jam thirty years back, they are seriously striving to create their own brand of songwriting. And (no question about it) they rock; this is not some sort of sanitized alternative bullshit, but a very live, angry, sharp sound.

Are the individual songs memorable? To their young audiences, I can imagine, they will be very much so, but against the background of fifty years of guitar-based rock records, they really look like, well, just another guitar-based rock band. Strange enough, the thing that lingered in my own brain longer than anything else was not their riffs, but rather Turner and Co.'s crazy vocal explo­sions — such as 'I don't want to hear you... KICK ME OUT, KICK ME OUT!' ('Fake Tales Of San Francisco'), or the immortal line 'Get on your dancing shoes, you sexy little swine' (sic!!), which I will treasure forever. These, at least, feel more 'immediate' than the melodies — the me­lodies place too much emphasis on smartness, and in the end I am not too sure if I am supposed to just bop and drop to those beats or to view them in a post-modern light, or both.

But the saddest thing is that I just cannot appreciate the atmosphere of it all. There is a big, ugly, smelly difference between the whole goddamn aura of Whatever People Say I Am and, let's say, Paul Weller's This Is The Modern World. In the late 1970's, British youth — not all of it, but the smartest part of it — was breathing discontent, and their spiritual leaders were singing and playing about getting out of this fucked-up place. The Arctic Monkeys, children of a (mostly) satisfied and content generation (in relative comparison, of course), are singing and playing about the drugged charms of this fucked-up place. Their attitude may be ironic — I hope it is ironic, at least in part; no, screw that, I know it is ironic, they have too many different words in their lyrics and too many notes in their melodies to be truly dumb — but if so, not many will see the irony, and those that will might think twice about headbanging to this music, which, controversially, is the most natural reaction to it.

Whatever People Say I Am is a loud, gruff record about the lives of loud, gruff people living loud, gruff club-lives that tempt them into using only one particular side of their brain, the one that is responsible for animal pleasures. All of the album's twelve songs are like one big concep­tual ensemble of a 12-hour period in the life of a jaded clubber. Typical subjects: [a] music, [b] dancing, [c] drinking, [d] necking / pulling / shagging, [e] talking trash, [f] various other human-level manners of animalizing. Sung in a brawny, disrespectful manner with a thick, almost inten­tionally amplified Yorkshire accent. Accompanied by music that is technically and theoretically «rock» but, once you start thinking about it, owes just as much to the hedonistic synth-pop of Duran Duran (for those who doubt it, Turner has dropped an extra lyrical cue in one of the lines on 'I Bet You Look Good') — and is a perfect match for the lyrical subjects.

A perfect symbol of the album's ambiguity is its cover, a photo of one of the band's friends (Chris McClure, frontman of The Violet May) taking a cigarette puff in Liverpool's famous Korova bar in the early morning hours. As a photo, it's an amazing piece of work — few images convey the idea of feeling absolutely terrific and like total shit at the exact same time. As food for thought, though, it's a serious downer. We need not feed ourselves illusions: the majority of the album's audience will simply use it for having a good party time, just like the majority of the Jam's audi­ence would use their music in 1977. However, the minority of the Jam's audience would be likely to sit down, listen, and be prompted into some kind of meaningful action. In the case of the Arc­tic Monkeys, though, I have no idea what the minority of their audience would be prompted into. Going out and simply hanging or shooting themselves is my best guess. 'Get on your dancing shoes, there's one thing on your mind'.

I like the Arctic Monkeys, really, I do. They are creative, intelligent, and when you see them playing onstage, they always look like the kind of smug, self-assured pricks that think of the rest of the world as undeserving crap — a very positive and healthy attitude. Even if I forget every single song of theirs tomorrow, today I still give this album a thumbs up for all the stimulating it does. I simply happen to hate the world that has produced the Arctic Monkeys. Clubbers, party animals, hipsters, Korova bars, 'banging tunes and DJ sets', 'lad at the side drinking a Smirnoff Ice came and paid for her Tro­pical Reef', 'classic Reeboks or knackered Converse' — could we have a hydrogen bomb for all that stuff and all the causes that cause that stuff and all the reasons underlying the causes that cause that stuff, too? Pretty please.