On The Car, Alex Turner writes elegant Americanised dispatches from ‘the business of show’ (Picture: Getty Images)
Cinema-loving readers, some still bewildered by the experience, may remember the 1999 film Being John Malkovich. Part of the plot (spoilers!) involved a failed puppeteer inhabiting the mind of actor Malkovich, exploiting the latter’s celebrity to successfully reboot his puppetry career.
It bears mentioning because if, a few years ago, you had been a musician with a then unfashionable devotion to leisurely mid-Seventies sophisti-rock, and had transformed your prospects by surreptitiously commandeering a highly popular indie-punk act, the result might look a great deal like Arctic Monkeys.
Alex Turner saw this coming, sort of. Back when he was a world-weary 18-year-old, he sang of bands from Hunter’s Bar and Rotherham who traded in ‘fake tales of San Francisco’ and New York.
Today he writes elegant Americanised dispatches from ‘the business of show’, redolent both in tone and musical style of Randy Newman and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, with a touch of Elvis Costello at his most obliquely caustic.
Not that one would accuse him of fakery – this is a world he’s come to know well, and even if he didn’t, there’s nowt wrong with using your imagination.
The Car, the Monkeys’ seventh studio album, is out on Friday (Picture: Domino Recording Company)
Arctic Monkeys’ latest body of work is enjoyable and erudite (Picture: Redferns)
Turner has always had plenty of that. These refined, tart, jaded songs feel like the pop equivalent of short stories from The New Yorker or The Paris Review. Hindsight suggests this is no volte-face, no act of possession, certainly no creative betrayal.
Rather, it’s the kind of evolution Roxy Music once effected: from gung-ho clatter to unhurried elegance, with the underlying sensibility unchanged. The Car is, granted, no Avalon.
But it is artful, enjoyable and erudite, an object lesson in maintaining both artistic courage and a mass audience.
Arctic Monkeys’ new album The Car is out on Friday.
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The Car is out now.