Soul, strings and grandstand balladry - Arctic Monkeys’ The Car is more wee small hours than AM.
Arctic Monkeys
★★★★
The Car
DOMINO. CD/DL/LP
There is a telling moment in MOJO’s new interview with the Arctic Monkeys. Alex Turner talks about being at home in Los Angeles, a couple of years ago, trying to write new songs on an electric guitar. “I remember trying to write riffs and stuff, make it louder,” Turner tells MOJO’s Keith Cameron. “But it just wasn’t… It didn’t want to go there. I think I might have even put me motorbike boots on one day to try and write a riff, but even that didn't work. Even that didn't summon the riff.”
As anyone who saw the Arctic Monkeys on their summer trawl round European festivals will know, Turner and his bandmates haven’t abandoned guitar rock entirely. But the seventh Arctic Monkeys album, The Car, presents a band sanguine about their evolving two-track career: brawny AM riffs in the fields and arenas; something altogether more recherché in the studio.
The Car, then, is the next logical step on from the cinematic soundworld that the band constructed for 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel And Casino. Initially, it doesn’t seem to even have anything as anthemic as that last album’s Four Out Of Five among its ten elegantly-wrought tracks. Turner’s vocals mostly come framed by string arrangements redolent of ‘70s symphonic soul - Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, maybe even Willie Mitchell’s plushest sessions with Al Green - and, most strikingly, of Scott Walker’s first four solo albums.
Turner’s been in this neighbourhood before with The Last Shadow Puppets, of course. That side project sometimes seemed too knowing for their own good – Turner and partner-in-crime Miles Kane playing dress-up in frilly shirts and crushed velvet. But new songs like The Car, Heroes And Villains harpsichord to the fore, and Perfect Sense, so fastidiously Bacharach baroque, inhabit a similar zone with far more conviction than pastiche.
There are guitars, nevertheless. I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am is flecked with gestural wah-wah, complementing a strut which recalls a latterday Monkeys totem, David Bowie, in his Plastic Soul phase. Body Paint, meanwhile, builds gracefully to a fuzzy crescendo and a Turner guitar solo that Keith Cameron accurately nails as “the full Mick Ronson”.
A wholehearted solo, too, even as Turner remains obsessively self-conscious about much of what he does. As with Tranquility Base Hotel And Casino, The Car is packed with quotable lines, droll references – presumably “Don’t let the sun catch you crying” is a Gerry & The Pacemakers nod? – and self-reflexive narrative tics. Only a slightly clunky “The business they call show” in Hello You doesn’t quite land. But for all the cinematographer tropes, it’s a more soulful, more nuanced, less arch record than its predecessor. When Turner alludes to a film this time, in Hello You, it's not a fantasia on tortured artistry like Fellini’s 8 And A Half, but gritty ‘50s Brit noir Tread Softly Stranger, filmed in Rotherham and worked on by his grandfather.
“I had big ideas, the band were so excited,” Turner croons in Big Ideas, always there with the pre-emptive defence lines, and more than ever, it’d be easy to see The Car as a solo album in all but name. But the truth, one suspects, is rather more complicated than that, and The Car is a complicated and incrementally rewarding album; the Arctic Monkeys’ best, possibly, and certainly one that reveals its hooks and snares with the measure and composure that the band now bring to all their craft.
It's not quite as detached from Monkeys past as it first appears, either. There’d Better Be A Mirrorball and Body Paint, especially, double down on the grand, elegiac balladry the band have been finessing since 2007’s 505. “I think this record doesn’t on the surface sound too much like the first album,” Alex Turner tells MOJO. “[But] I do feel like we’re still listening now to the same instinct that was telling us how to do that stuff then. Following those instincts, and trying not to let the other factors, whatever they may be, get in the way. You’re still trying to do a good job, up there in the spotlight.”
The Car is out 21 October, via Domino.
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