Arctic Monkeys – Humbug

Arctic Monkeys - Humbug

At a stage in their career where a even a bad album would undoubtedly still be commercially well received, Arctic Monkeys go for broke and serve up a much darker, more menacing follow up to 2007’s Favourite Worst Nightmare.

After spending time holed up in the Joshua Tree studio in the Mojave desert, working with co-producers Josh Homme (Queens Of The Stone Age) and Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford – who drummed and produced for Alex Turner’s side project The Last Shadow Puppets – the band return for a punt at a new direction, with older influences (The Doors, Cream, Jimi Hendrix) and Homme the combined driving force behind this almost psychedelic venture into vintage revivalism.

Opener ‘My Propeller’ isn’t the best of starts – innuendo-laden lyrics such as “My propeller won’t spin / And I can’t get it started on my own” are fun, yet clearly not a display of Turner’s best work. His usual eloquence doesn’t always show, namely in ‘Fire And The Thud’, a song that probably should have been relegated to a b-side, and ‘Pretty Visitors’, with its snarled yet curiously bizarre line “what came first/the chicken or the dickhead?”. To claim that the lyrics totally pale in comparison to past work is an injustice, and for every bad line there are several clever lines to counter it – on ‘Dangerous Animals’, Turner belts out a dyslexia-friendly chorus - “I’m pinned down by the dark/A-N-I-M-A-L/Makes my head pirouette/More than I would be willing to confess/D-A-N-G-E-R-O-U-S”.

By far the best written track is ‘Cornerstone’, a song that will ensnare listeners on a pandemic level – where Turner croons about the mistaken identity of a girl in a pub. A close second is ‘Dance Little Liar’, which snappily describes somebody wrapped in facade - “And the clean coming will hurt/And you can never get it spotless/When there’s dirt beneath the dirt”.

Tracks like ‘Potion Approaching’ and lead single ‘Crying Lightning’ confirm a strong alliance between old and new, continuing Humbug on its deliberately vague set of narratives that meander throughout this record, including substance usage, women and loss – potentially that of a previous lover – leaving the listener free to interpret each song as they wish. These themes are more notable on album closer ‘The Jeweller’s Hands’, the lynchpin which holds the other nine songs in place.

Humbug is surprisingly bereft of singles, but this isn’t to say that there’s a dearth of quality, quite the opposite – besides the already released ‘Crying Lightning’, the most-obvious candidates to be released are ‘Cornerstone’ and ‘Secret Door’, leaving the remainder a collective of solid songs, but nothing to warrant serious radio airplay based on content, instead more likely to be heard on the basis of reputation.

Although at times it feels like a mixture of their first two records combined with a nervous attempt to run in a different direction, Humbug is a brave departure; the temptation must surely have been to maintain the status quo. Since working with Homme they have clearly stretched the boundary of their collective comfort zones and for this, Arctic Monkeys should be applauded – even if the consistency of quality doesn’t threaten the bar of their previous work.