Album of the week with Arctic Monkeys

2022-10-21T16:43:22.492Z

Rock band was yesterday: The Arctic Monkeys climb the Rolls Royce of their second phase of their career with the luxurious lounge pop of »The Car« – our album of the week. Also: Dry Cleaning, bbno$, MIA and Lucrecia Dalt.

Enlarge image

Rock band Arctic Monkeys, singer Turner (2nd from left)

Photo: Michael Zackery/Domino Records

Album of the week:

Arctic Monkeys - »The Car«

It's easy to forget that Alex Turner is only 36 years old, he sounds so melancholic and world-weary in the new songs of his band Arctic Monkeys.

Maybe pop star years count a little like dog years: the brighter the spotlight burns, the quicker the burnout comes.

However, only the protagonist in Turner's songs appears burnt out.

The singer, songwriter and band leader himself, on the other hand, is in full possession of his powers on »The Car«.

In immersive, luxurious and languid soundtrack compositions floating on piano, bass and string arrangements, he creates almost cinematic scenes with a narrator and crooner looking bittersweetly at the world of glamor and fame.

It seems that these grown-up Arctic Monkeys have nothing to do with the snotty, powerful, juvenile rock music of their debut album.

What Turner sings about hasn't changed much - only his perspective.

And of course his talent, which has now been expanded by various skills, to embed and illustrate the lyrics musically.

So you could say the band has radically reinvented itself, but remains true to its core.

That alone is one of the best and most unlikely stories rock music has had to tell in recent memory.

Because usually bands have maybe three or four good albums at the beginning of their career, after that the miserable path to self-quotation and the creative dead end often begins.

The Arctic Monkeys were destined for a similar fate.

What is easy to forget is that the band, which was founded exactly 20 years ago, was one of the first You Tube phenomena to gain fame and a record deal.

Their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, was the fastest-selling album in UK chart history in 2006 and sat musically comfortably among other post-punk revival records coming out at the time.

The zenith of this rock'n'roll phase was reached in 2013 with the fifth album »AM«, after which things would probably have gone downhill if Alex Turner hadn't already been exploring other genres, Sxities-Soul, with his second band The Last Shadow Puppets and lounge pop.

In 2018 he also implemented this new sound with the Arctic Monkeys.

At the amazing Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, leather jacket wearers had become velvet-suited socialites.

With Turner as the dandy frontman with an attitude somewhere between Bryan Ferry, David Bowie (whose style he competently imitates on the song "I Ain't Quite Where I Think I Am") and Serge Gainsbourg.

Arctic Monkeys

the car

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»The Car« now gives this outrageous (and ultimately successful) move additional, lasting weight.

In the opening track, "There'd Better Be a Mirrorball," Turner lets Isaac Hayes' "Walk On By" slide by in the long, gleefully building intro before he then intones his own interpretation of this sad Bacharach melody: here, too, the protagonist has been abandoned, but instead of telling the ex to just pass by, Turner has specific staging guidelines for his exit, in which, even if he had previously said he wouldn't do it, he would still let out the old romantic: "So if you wanna walk me to the car/ You oughta know I'll have a heavy heart/ So can we please be absolutely sure/ That there's a mirrorball?” he sings.

Many songs from the debut album, whose title (and some songs) referred to the novel »Saturday Night And Sunday Morning« by Alan Sillitoe, were already played under this disco glitter ball.

In the emotionally dubious phase between adrenaline and crash, many songs on »The Car« are floating again.

Some feel like nouvelle vague sequels shot from pub to high society of early hits like "Still Take You Home" or "When The Sun Goes Down", some are set in broad daylight like "The Car" or "Hello You «, in which sunny holiday scenes on the Riviera can suddenly appear menacingly thunderous with rumbling electronic sounds.

A getaway car (or jet ski) is always somewhere nearby but not used.

The narrator is the same morally unstable fellow as in the band's earlier songs, he acts as the often cynical director of the party sceneries he observes, sarcastically reproaches the model in "Body Paint" for having remnants of body paint everywhere: The paint is off, baby!

However, in the hilarious "Big Ideas" he loses control over the grandiloquent musical ideas that slip out of his grasp while the orchestra is already playing.

And in "Mr.

Schwartz« the »Dancing Shoes« from the debut album come into play again, but they are dirty and the velvet suit urgently needs a lint roller.

"Help me to get untied from the chandelier," sings Turner, now an impressively accomplished Northern soul singer, on "Sculptures of Anything Goes," one of the album's few faster songs.

(9.0)

Listened briefly:

Dry Cleaning - »Stumpwork«

Another band that emancipates itself from genre attributions.

Out of sheer helplessness, Dry Cleaning were assigned to the new wave of British post-punk acts after the release of their stunning debut »New Long Leg«.

On their no less fascinating follow-up, once again produced by indie whisperer John Parish, musical constraints are now completely dissolved: the band masters lively Belle and Sebastian Jangle (»Gary Ashby«) as well as jazzy ambient or Mogwai post-rock (» Anna Calls From The Arctic«) or funky herb psychedelic (»Hot Penny Day«).

The casually rocked »Don't Press Me« only sounds like a pop concession.

Of course, the star of the dry-cleaning machine, which tends towards immersive jams live, remains rap artist and lyricist Florence Shaw,

who once again roams aimlessly through London, sharing her observations in a sonorous, laconic, often surreal stream of consciousness – as if she were standing on the assembly line of an everyday prose factory, boredly doing her monotonous stumpwork.

Sometimes she is suddenly pointed ("I see male violence everywhere"), sometimes, for example in "Conservative Hell" or in the title piece, she describes allegorical scenes from present-day Britain between mindless consumerism and decadent materialism on the one hand, and poverty and homelessness on the other: "I thought I saw a young couple clinging to a round baby/ But it was a bundle of trash and food/ Trash and food/ Doo doo doo doo doo«.

Before it gets too much under your skin, the band distracts with a few elaborate garlands, and Shaw saves himself with Dada lyrics in stupendous songs like "Icebergs",

in which trio and wire shake hands.

Let's say it with Christiane Rösinger: Praise the dull work!

(8.3)

bbno$ - »Bag Or Die«

This column doesn't tend to be nostalgic, but oh, wasn't that pretty in the 90's?

So outrageously hedonistic, so politically uncomplicated?

So-so.

But it's no wonder that the nineties and noughties revival is rolling strong.

26-year-old Canadian rapper bbno$ (Baby No Money) has had the right retro attitude for it ("I don't give a fuck about anything and try to have as much fun as I humanly can") since hits like "Lalala « (with Y2K) and «Edamame« (with Rich Brian) millions of fans on TikTok - and enough catchy hooks to release the seventh album with infectious two and a half minute tracks already - since 2018. »Bag Or Die« is a Nod to 50 Cent, another noughties milestone, but in the lyrics of bbno$ aka Alexander Gumuchian,

who has Armenian-Danish-Swiss roots and has to be read as white bread, the hip-hop-typical bragging about status symbols and rising stars mostly only serves as a backdrop for the most witty puns possible (»Robert Patekson«, harhar).

The level of silliness is reminiscent of Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake's gag collabs.

("Vasectomy"), the costume and anarchy rage in the video clips to Ali G. But Gumuchian should be careful not to mix his efficient, now-perfected sound of Caribbean samples, mariachi guitars, "candy shop" rhythms and shaking rhymes -Cascades not overused.