The Car is, to put it simply, the best thing Arctic Monkeys have done since Humbug.
There. I’ve said it.
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.
The fifth track on the album is the last of the singles left, and the best one, ‘Body Paint’. We have already talked about our love of the track here, but in the context of the album itself, it is even greater. It’s practically a microcosm of the whole album: beautiful strings, seventies rock and funk, emotionally-fraught lyrics, before this intense crescendo where all is laid bare, masterfully. ‘Body Paint’ may not just be the best song on the album, but one of the best songs the band has ever done.
After ‘Body Paint’ comes the clearly Ennio Morricone-influenced title track, ‘The Car’. The Spaghetti Western sound of the track, emphasised by the classical guitar and the pulsing, rhythmic sound of the song, really ties together the “Film Score” theme of the album. The whole thing feels like the soundtrack to some obscure, Italian film from the seventies, or the score to a lost Jean-Pierre Melville film. Turner often talked about the influence both Ennio Morricone and François de Roubaix had on the sound of Tranquillity Base Hotel + Casino, as well as Everything You’ve Come To Expect, the second album with side-project The Last Shadow Puppets. This influence has clearly not only persisted, but has been honed by Turner and the rest of the band, to greater thematic purpose.
The seventh track on the album, ‘Big Ideas’, continues the lounge-singer aesthetic Turner has been going for. Musically my favourite song, ‘Big Ideas’, despite it’s soft and slow start, gradually builds up to an incredible guitar sequence at the end, with a riff soaked in reverb. Following on from ‘Big Ideas’ comes ‘Hello You’. A fast-paced, funkier track, clearly influenced by The Beatles’ ‘The Long And Winding Road’, the song is another highlight on the album. Lyrically quite subtlety self-aware, the song discusses how, in some way or another, we need to let go of the past. In my view, the song is a reference to Arctic Monkeys’ musical progression; how they, and their fans, have to accept they are not what they once were, and must move on to bigger, and better things.
The penultimate track of the album, ‘Mr Schwartz’, showcases a very South-American influenced sound, specifically Samba. The guitar-playing is intricate and beautiful, and the stripped back nature of the song contrasts nicely with the rest of the album. Lyrically, again Turner seems to take a lot of influence from Richard Hawley. Alex Turner’s vocal shift to full falsetto really allows him to emphasise the more emotional nature of the lyrics, whilst at the same time creating an almost detached feeling, portraying a real sense of melancholia. The album then ends with ‘Perfect Sense’, a slow romp through a beautiful baroque arrangement, nicely concluding the album.
The Car is a work of art. It is the fantastic culmination of experimentation that Arctic Monkeys have been on since at least Tranquillity Base, and I would say represents the marrying of the two styles that Alex Turner has cultivated with Arctic Monkeys and The Last Shadow Puppets respectively. It is vastly different to anything they have done before, especially when compared to the first couple of albums, and whilst some may struggle with that, the band have clearly demonstrated how important their musical evolution is to them. Whilst Tranquillity Base Hotel + Casino represented the biggest musical shift the band had done yet, this new direction was clearly still in its infancy. With The Car, Arctic Monkeys have distilled all that was good from their last two albums, whilst creating something more refined, more entertaining, and simply better.
Rating: 10/10
