Arctic Monkeys have abandoned lurching darkness for wistful guitar pop. It suits them
Listen to Suck It and See here
Those looking for evidence that things are as they always were in the world of Arctic Monkeys ? that the celebrity girlfriends, chumminess with P Diddy and sojourns in Hollywood mansions while recording in LA have failed to impact on what Bernard Ingham would call the Yorkshireman's "awkward gene" ? might alight on the two songs they chose to trail their fourth album. Brick By Brick was leaked by the band in March, three minutes of sludgy filler with drummer Matt Helders on vocals. "I wanna feel your love, I wanna steal your soul," it offered, "I wanna rock and roll." A month later, Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair appeared. It was an improvement, with flashes of dry wit ? "Find a well-known hardman and start a fight" sang Alex Turner, goading his protagonist to ever-greater feats of reckless daring, "wear your shellsuit on bonfire night" ? but still cleaved fast to the lumbering stoner-rock model of 2009's Humbug, an album that managed to considerably whittle down Arctic Monkeys' fanbase. Humbug shifted enough records to top the charts in the week of its release, but that was still a quarter of a million fewer than their debut sold in its first week. And their headlining slots at Reading and Leeds met with what you'd politely call a muted response ? probably just what happens if you open a headlining set at a festival with two slow ones from your new album and a Nick Cave cover.
Nevertheless, the sense that Arctic Monkeys had lost a chunk of their audience was hard to avoid. It was probably the Hackett-clad beer-chuckers they used to share with Oasis who bailed out: nothing upsets that particular subsection of the record-buying public quite like changing your sound a bit, an act they seem to regard as evidence of pretension and possibly effeminacy. Brick By Brick and Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair rather suggested Arctic Monkeys thought they were well shot of that crowd, a sensation compounded when you play Suck It and See and discover that they're the two least representative tracks.
Instead, the album takes as its starting point Humbug's least representative track, Cornerstone, a sighing, richly melodic lament at odds with the lurching, Josh Homme-produced darkness evident elsewhere. The result is the first Arctic Monkeys album that tries to ensnare the listener with its tunes, rather than guitar riffs or Turner's lyrics. Oddly, what its mid-tempo stew of thick basslines, feedback-laden guitar lines, churning chord progressions and thumping drums occasionally recalls ? presumably unwittingly ? is the ooh-look-at-the-cosh-boys Morrissey of the mid-90s, though anyone who feels their spirits understandably sinking at the mention of that particular juncture of Morrissey's career should note that the contents of Suck It and See are noticeably tighter, lighter on their feet and infinitely more fun than anything on Southpaw Grammar.
Love Is a Laserquest and The Hellcat Spangled Shalala are sparkling and confident: Arctic Monkeys make for more convincing purveyors of wistful guitar pop than they did South Yorkshire's answer to Queens of the Stone Age. Meanwhile, you sense Turner still feeling his way around the business of writing lyrics that aren't about, as he recently put it, "fucking taxi ranks". The style he's opted for ? dense, Dylanesque wordplay ? is tough to get right. More often than not, he pulls it off. There are beautifully turned phrases and piercing observations: the wry drawing of a "chin-chewing" cokehead on Black Treacle (another song with a luminous tune); Reckless Serenade's depiction of a moment of clumsy passion "where teeth collide". Equally, however, there are moments where the overload of images runs out of control: "I etched the face of a stopwatch on the back of a raindrop, and did a swap for the sand in an hourglass," he sings on Piledriver Waltz, which, with all due respect, sounds like something written by Fish from Marillion.
In fact, Suck It and See's worst crime isn't overindulgence, but occasionally sounding ordinary. Listening to the couple of songs whose tunes don't effortlessly lodge themselves in your brain ? All My Own Stunts, Library Pictures ? you struggle to imagine that Arctic Monkeys were once so freighted with expectations, a band who inspired one august rock critic to spend his cash following them around Europe like a lovestruck fan ("This is not a mid-life crisis," he wrote in the subsequent article, before adjusting his leather trousers and driving off in his recently purchased Porsche Boxster).
Always sanguine about the hysteria, Arctic Monkeys might point out they themselves struggled to believe that at the time. There's no way anyone can deliver on that kind of start: better to become an increasingly well-rounded rock band, which is precisely what Suck It and See sounds like.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jun/02/arctic-monkeys-suck-it-and-see-review
No comments:
Post a Comment