
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”. … Continue Reading
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