What a brilliant burst of cod-spy thriller soundtrack lounge croon bombastic orchestrated melodramatic bedlam this is.  The Arctic Monkeys last album was something of a damp squib really, although it contained a little bit of quite decent material, but it seemed like a band who just made an album without really thinking about why.

Listening to that album, one track which really struck me was this one:

Arctic Monkeys - The Bakery

At the time I thought ‘bugger me, Alex must be developing a bit of a Richard Hawley fetish’.  Both being from Sheffield this didn’t seem too far-fetched, and as much as I was left underwhelmed by most of Flourescent Adolescent, it piqued my interest for their next album.  I never expected this though!

Instead of a slightly 50s-sounding Monkeys album Turner and his pal Miles Kane have gone all the way and more, producing an album a radio DJ apparently described as “more Scott Walker than Scott Walker”.  I don’t really know much Scott Walker, so I couldn’t tell you how much sense this makes.  Quite how they recorded this in a fortnight is beyond me, but hearing something like this, even a scratch and hiss fanatic like myself finds himself thinking ‘now that’s what Big Production is for’.  It could be the soundtrack to a dozen stylish sixties films, or a dozen spy movies: theatrical, grandiose and really ambitious.

It’s brilliantly successful too, a real rattling, swooning pleasure to listen to, although I have a minor, nagging caveat.  For all the music of the Artctic Monkeys sometimes left me a little cold, it was generally saved by Alex Turner’s baldly honest lyrics and incredibly deft turn of phrase.  The turn of phrase is still clearly at his command here, but the writing is much more artful, which sometimes makes this album feel like more of a stylistic exercise than a heartfelt musical one.  They are exploring, and fair play to them, few bands could manage anything half so inventive, nor so enormously excellent, but there are times when it seems slightly more like a project and less like a mission.

The Last Shadow Puppets - My Mistakes Were Made For You

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