Review

Album number three and the Arctic Monkeys have decided to put their passports to good use and travel beyond the quaintly English worldview and musical isolationism that defined their first two long players. Recording sessions in Brooklyn with Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford and in the Mojave Desert with Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme have played their part, lending Humbug an expansive sound and attitude. Staking out – what is by their standards at least – virgin territory, they’ve pitched camp in heavier, lustier, but utterly fertile ground.

Alex Turner, for one, has a fever to sweat out, with ‘My Propeller’ finding him pleading for someone to come along and kickstart his carnal engine. At times, the psychosexual tension of songs like ‘Crying Lightning’ and the frenzied, QOTSA-aping ‘Dangerous Animals’ calls to mind Tennessee Williams – Monkey On A Hot Tin Roof, anyone? Base impulses co-exist alongside bastardised notions of romance. ‘Cornerstone’ is at first glance tender and wryly funny – “My chances turned to toast / When I asked could I call her your name” – but is soon careering to a jolting close.

Elsewhere, ‘Pretty Visitors’, replete with carnival Wurlitzer sounds, reaches a hellish crescendo as Turner reprises his stroppy little islander act from albums past. Whilst the place names and colloquialisms have been quelled somewhat, the acid observations still find employ – “What came first, the chicken or the dickhead?”. It’s an all-incident 40 minutes, coated in lust, the dense rhythms, distorted riffs and wilfully weird noises evidence of the Monkeys’ determination to keep evolving. Humbug should give both long time fans and sceptics alike plenty to chew over. Francis Jones

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

DOWNLOAD: ‘MY PROPELLER’, ‘CORNERSTONE’ ‘DANCE LITTLE LIAR’.
FOR FANS OF: QOTSA, THE CORAL, MARK LANEGAN.

Posted on: September 17, 2009