Album of the Week: Arctic Monkeys deliver shimmering paradox of parody and originality with ‘The Car’
At this stage, Arctic Monkeys have barely half-stumbled over an upraised paving slab, let alone faltered. Everything they have done has rightly been critically hailed and commercially lapped up. They find themselves in the rarefied sweet spot of being the headline act everybody wants to see. They are, in this regard, a generational band. And in this generation, they are just about the only guitar band who can claim that throne.
It’s a precipice that comes with its own set of artistic privileges and pitfalls. Both are on display in The Car. But lest we forget, we’re picking apart the nuances here; we’re still dealing with a record that affirms the band’s relative infallibility and refusal to be anything other than exceptional. It is almost redundant to say that it’s a great record; anyone could’ve penned that last year when their return was merely hinted at, they have established themselves as a band with a wellspring of quality and prowess. However, that is still a point worth noting: Ask yourself this, if this was the debut album of a brand-new band, would it be a triumph? Absolutely.
So, with their wavering back catalogue cutting an ever-evolving serpentine path behind them, aside from triumphant, what does The Car sound like? Well, it’s a wayward ramble, a highfalutin farce of topline melody gone awry like the waltzing words of Leon Russell. It’s glossy to such a slick degree that even an ’80s Bond movie might ask for the sleaze to be turned down a touch. And yet the inverse of all the above is also true. It’s heroically cinematic. The lack of choruses seems like a progressive move in the modern guitar era – we’ve matured beyond singalongs. It chucks in tritone moments to fit the prose like a clever composer of old. It’s chansonnier crooning atop a funk guitar, and that’s as rare as acid-skiffle, yet this anthemic smooth jazz will still be a stadium-filling frenzy when The Car hits the road.
Thus, in the waxes and wanes of this record, there are moments where you find yourself almost strangely infuriated. There are snippets where you find yourself laughing, wondering whether Alex Turner is taking the piss and over-egging his new style before conducting your own drunken prolix of oddball drivel. It’s like he’s actively providing fodder for comic YouTube immitators. There are snippets when you – yes, even you, who have followed them through thick and thin and been thankful for all your horizons that they have helped to broaden – crave the thrashy chorus of an old debut album classic. You might even wonder if such a clear focus on style has impacted artistic sincerity.
That curse is skirted because there are more moments when the strings whisk you up; Turner croons a note out of nowhere that threatens to lull Sputnik out of orbit, and the band coalesce in such a way that can only be called Monkeysesque. The brimming joy of glistening originality – that so few are capable of – knocks you off your feet and whizzes you off to dreamy cloud nine to hear about Al’s warped vision of a Riviera rendered by Ennio Morricone and Jean Luc Godard in cahoots. In fact, what once seemed like a blemish is transfigured into part of the charm, part of the profound quirky personality, like the endearing bumbling in a Norm MacDonald joke whereby stuttering towards the punchline only adds to the reward.
These moments put the previous bewildering lines about “pyjama pants and a Subbuteo cloak” to bed and dish out a dose of sexy eudemonia. When the bass rolls in after the acoustic opening to ‘Mr Schwartz’ or the increased tempo of ‘Hello You’ (perhaps the album’s best song) forces the lyrical melody to wander less and toe the line, the groovy swagger is astounding.
Thematically it’s a lot of classic mag cover shoots, travel-size Champagne flutes, and patent leather dancing shoes. In short, it’s a whirlwind of imagery that can bewilder, but more often than not, it dazzles. And when you find yourself at home in this holiday villa of an album, you look back at your stay and never want to leave. Those moments when you wondered whether they had finally gotten ahead of themselves are forgotten, like the little petty squabble with your travelling companion, soon rendered a necessary pothole on the memory lane of an otherwise total result of a holiday.
You’re swaying in the sun, and it’s a perfect escape from reality, just in time for the shimmering last night finale that has you dreaming of the drama of romance like few albums you can remember. Just as Turner closes the show and croons in such style that marble statues hang their heads, “Sometimes, I wrap my head around it all, and it makes perfect sense,” The Car is a journey you’ll wanna take again.
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