The fans have already made their decision on which is the best Arctic Monkeys album. All six of them went to number one, but as the band made their way back to the spotlight in recent months with Reading and Leeds Festival appearances and two new singles, it’s the manspreading rock of AM, from 2013, that has returned to the top 10.
Notably, the eccentric, high-concept easy listening music of their last long-player, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, continues to baffle the masses, which means this follow-up will also frustrate those who long to hear Matt Helders pound his drums with abandon once more. Strings are still in, guitars still out, unless you count the wiry funk style adopted on I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am. The huge success of AM hasn’t painted songwriter Alex Turner into a corner. His band has their ackowledged classic. Now they can explore.
So while there’s nothing on The Car to make a mosh pit (though the cavernous bass of Sculptures of Anything Goes might hurt a few heads) the sonic richness on display here is remarkable. The opening song, the single There’d Better Be a Mirrorball, is an exquisite mix of piano and strings, confident enough to take a long pause before it really finds its groove. The title track is filled with orchestral grandeur.
Ever since his teenage missive became Britain’s fastest-selling debut album, Turner has never seemed comfortable with the idea of being a rock star. Here his abdication continues. His lines are largely snapshots of surrealism (who’ll be the first fan to get the lyric tattoo “Lego Napoleon movie written in noble gas-filled tubes underlined in sparks,” which opens Hello You?) but where he does appear to be talking sense, on Big Ideas, he’s singing about his band in the past tense: “We had ‘em out of their seats, waving their arms and stomping their feet,” he croons in tones that have never been more warm and sophisticated. “Over and out. Really, it’s been a thrill.” On Sculptures…, it sounds like he already knows what the reviews might say: “Puncturing your bubble of relatability with your horrible new sound.”
But there’s nothing horrible about it. It harks back to vintage soundtracks, Scott Walker, Burt Bacharach, Frank Sinatra and more recent introspective singer-songwriters such as Father John Misty and Richard Hawley. What it doesn’t sound like is the Arctic Monkeys of a decade ago, but so what? We’ll always have AM, and now we have something else that’s extraordinary in a whole new way.
