Our October choice for Album of the Month is the seventh, seminar album by Sheffield icons Arctic Monkeys, The Car.
Here’s a snippet from Charlie Sweeney’s review of the album:
Genuinely, the Sheffield band’s seventh album is incredible. It represents a culmination of the band’s experimentation in sound that has seemingly been going on since Suck It And See. A combination of Father John Misty, Ennio Morricone, David Bowie and Richard Hawley, The Car is the band’s most mature record and their most experimental. It truly demonstrates the magnificent musical evolution the Arctic Monkeys have been on since their second album, validating the risks Alex Turner and the rest of the group have clearly been taking since their inception.
The album begins with the first of the three singles, ‘There’d Better Be A Mirrorball’. A fantastic opener, ‘There’d Better Be A Mirrorball’ begins with a beautiful string section, before the strings fade out, and you’re left with an ominous, stabbing piano sound. But before you can get suitably frightened, the strings are back, and the melancholic 70s fuzz is laid out before you. Already from the first track, you can clearly hear the Richard Hawley influence on Turner, especially from Hawley’s masterpiece Coles Corner. As Alex Turner crooning-ly asks “So do you wanna walk me to the Car?/I’m sure to have a heavy heart”, it’s clear that the surreal lyricism of the band’s last album, Tranquillity Base Hotel + Casino, is all but gone, with Turner back to his song-writing best. Following ‘There’d Better Be A Mirrorball’ comes another single, ‘I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am’. Kicking off with some fantastically 70s Funk riffs, ‘I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am’ is very clearly an ode to the late 70s/early 80s Bowie, especially American Dogs.
The third track on the album, ‘Sculptures of Anything Goes’, is our first non-single track of the album. And it was sure worth the wait. Unlike anything the band have ever done before, ‘Sculptures of Anything Goes’ takes the ominous thread left by the first track and unravels it, creating a menacing masterpiece that is easily one of the highlights of the album. Atmospheric and claustrophobic, the track has Turner at his, vocally, most raw and vulnerable, totally contrasting the overbearing instrumentals, especially the guitar. It almost feels as if the vocals are running away from, trying to escape, the musical backing. ‘Sculptures of Anything Goes’ is easily the darkest song Arctic Monkeys have ever made, and the tonal shift from the more up-beat, or at least softer, previous tracks really cements this. The fourth track on the album, ‘Jet Skis On The Moat’, is probably the weakest song on the album. That is not to say it is a bad song, but I feel like, musically and thematically, ‘I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am’ does everything ‘Jet Skis On The Moat’ does, but slightly better.
Charlie’s full review can be found here.