Like the grand movie twist, the camera pulls back on 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino to reveal that it was never on the moon at all. It was a lunar-themed complex in the heart of old Vegas. Arctic Monkeys’ curveball sixth album, all cosmic cocktail lounge vibes and plush retro-futurist visions, wasn’t the one-off it sounded, the stepping-off point for a voyage into a great sonic unknown. Instead, it was the sound of the Monkeys docking at their intended destination, having raced from the sordid streets of Sheffield – via Turner’s similarly Sixties-obsessed side project The Last Shadow Puppets – to the Bellagio whiskey bar residency in just 16 years.
The Car, their seventh record, could be subtitled Weird But Soothing in Las Vegas. For much of the album, singer Alex Turner sounds as though he’s fronting a workaday lounge band in the Golden Nugget, reeling off interchangeable soul, funk and bossa nova tributes to Matt Monroe, Marvin Gaye and Dionne Warwick for a distracted crowd. Bacharach strings descend at times, making “There’d Better be a Mirrorball” and the gentle flamenco drama of the title track sound like the sort of John Barry refrain you’d hear as 007 arrives at a tropical locale… before anything exciting happens.
