Rating: ✪✪✪
The fact that this will take its place as the weakest link of Arctic Monkeys’ repertoire doesn’t really tell the whole story.
And that’s because, well, in truth Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is far more interesting for what it is than what it does – it’s a lounge album from a band that has built their mythos on their versatile and enduring knack for producing solid, memorable pop singles.
It’s also the most conceptually focused album you will have probably have heard in some time. More than simply being one of those records with some thematic continuity threaded in tracks, this album can only really be made sense of as a single body of a work; a vivid portrayal of a fantastical lunar hotel bar that is, despite being on the moon, still very much a hotel bar.
Now, while lyrically and technically more adventurous than anything we’ve heard from Alex Turner before, I can’t say this album does, on the whole, really reward you for listening to it. The songs don’t stick like they usually do with Arctic Monkeys. They don’t make it easy for you to love them.
And perhaps that’s fine. Turner and his compeers have developed musically and personally so much over the years that anything other than another drastic change of style after AM would have been a step backwards.
But that can’t change the overall mood that Tranquility Base seems to represent the end of the group’s creative summer rather than another episode of it. As is simply a truth borne of their stage in the lifecycle of a band of such status, it would seem time to accept that we have probably witnessed the best that will come of Arctic Monkeys already.
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Reappraisal: Less than a week later, and I’m already starting to see this record in a kinder light, albeit still with the view that it occupies the tier below all their other releases. Guess this one is really is just as much of a grower as everyone was making out.
benedict tetzlaff - deas. 