Instead of a traditional top-10 list for the end of the year, Split Tooth Media is releasing a series of essays about the music that we felt mattered most in 2018. Read why here and read other installments here.
Some are treating Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino as a brave exploration of new sounds. Others see it as a meandering drag. Regardless of critical consensus, it’s an oddball of an album for a band following its commercial peak.
Arctic Monkeys’ frontman Alex Turner tells this futuristic lunar narrative through the gaze of a has-been piano man playing for drunks at the bar of a luxury hotel on the moon. Humankind has moved to the moon after “the Exodus” and gentrification, unnecessary technological advancement and depression have followed. Turner frequently references technology and entertainment and his “desire to escape into it, and the desire to create it” when the real world becomes a little too real, for either Turner himself or his Julian Casablancas-wannabe character who “just wanted to be one of the Strokes.”
The first notes of “Star Treatment” make it clear that this isn’t the usual Arctic Monkeys affair, if such a thing exists. The album is ushered in with a soft vibraphone jazz vibe, echoing drums and delicate guitars. Turner’s wordy lyrics are the constant high point through the Arctic Monkeys’ discography. This album continues the trend, this time with Turner creating a “big name in deep space” alter ego. His lyrics feel nonsensical, but his signature deeper-meaning syllable stuffing is what has made him one of the best living songwriters.
“I found out the hard way / That here ain’t no place for dolls like you and me / Everybody’s on a barge / Floating down the endless stream of great TV / 1984, 2019.” Here he packs a loaded statement about television addiction in modern society within the futuristic setting of the moonscape. By relating the less-than-distant future of 2019 with George Orwell’s famed year of totalitarian prediction, our dire technological addictions make Big Brother seem a little less invasive. To round out the 1984 reference, Turner begins “One Point Perspective” with a dwindling train of thought of running for government, dancing in his underpants or forming a covers band as if each idea packs equal validity. The distance between politician and celebrity continues to shrink, so why not entertain a gamut of ideas?
The choruses aren’t as obvious as on the hook-laden AM. Tranquility Base’s changes are more subtle, creating a dreamy haze that makes listeners feel like one of the hotel’s patrons being serenaded by Turner after one drink too many. You can feel every emotion Turner conveys. Being the last to leave a party that’s long-since over is never fun. Turner is well aware of this and perfectly expresses what it’s like to watch a scene you grew up in dissipate. “I’ve played to quiet rooms like this before,” he croons on “One Point Perspective.” Though not explicitly about Turner himself, it tells us more of how he feels about fame and entertainment than anything autobiographical.
Turner retreated within himself while writing and recording this album. He’s a tabloid sensation in his home country of England, but he wrote this album in seclusion in Los Angeles. As a line that’s buried in the title track hints, he perhaps went too far in exploring his dark side, or experienced the dark side in humanity: “Do you celebrate your dark side then wish you’d never left the house? / Have you ever spent a generation trying to figure that one out?” The message builds from an earlier line in “Tranquility Base”: “Do you remember when it all went wrong? / Technological advances really bloody get me in the mood,” Turner sings before asking for a kiss under the moon’s sideboob. He mixes the ending of Earth with a technologically inspired lustful wish, perfectly encapsulating the confusion and desperation of finding love in a lonely world.
The search for love returns on “She Looks Like Fun,” a sludgy rocker about moving into a virtual reality where the parties are plugged directly into your skull, a concept that’s as unnerving as it is enticing. The extent of the virtual world is so extreme that the streets are empty. “It’s all been moved online / As of March,” he sings. The chorus finds Turner crooning whatever words comes to mind, from cheeseburger to New Order. It feels like the piano man sharing his fear of the future — and perhaps his reservations about “disappearing into a screen.” Technology rides a fine line between sexy and dangerous.
In “Four Out Of Five” Turner assesses life on the moon and the absurdity of how gentrification knows no bounds, even after the “Exodus.” He opens a well-reviewed taqueria on the roof of a luxury hotel on the moon and names it the “Information Action Ratio.” Advertisements and free trials follow. If you can afford it, the service exists in excessive packaging. The allure of the advertised deals is backed by a Beatle-esque key change in the bridge that shows the band’s development from greaser teen punks to smooth-playing international sex symbols.
Much like on AM, Matt Helder’s drums take on a more reserved role focused on mood over power. But Jamie Cook stretches his delayed guitar riffs to new heights that find a perfect home in the hotel and casino. Nick O’Malley continues as the band’s backbone with constantly moving bass riffs that provide a firm, but flexible, groundwork for the band to build on.
Album closer “The Ultracheese” finds Turner at his most reflective. The song has an open diary feeling of how times have changed since the band’s early days. “Get freaked out from a knock at the door / When I haven’t been expecting one / Didn’t that used to be part of the fun, once upon a time?” Fame may seem like a welcome dream until you realize the confines that come with it, which is likely why Turner wrote much of the album isolated in his apartment. “What a death I died writing that song / Start to finish, with you looking on / It stays between us, Steinway, and his sons.”
The band plays at a slow churn creating a lullaby state reflexive of their changing catalog and lives. But the key line comes before the concluding changeup. He reminisces about the pictures of friends on the wall who have entered and exited his life, while pausing on an image of himself. “I might look as if I’m deep in thought,” he says before the song pivots behind an eight bar piano shuffle. “But the truth is I’m probably not / If I ever was.” He then croons the beat back down, resettling the song to its base where Cook chimes in with a subtle guitar solo. The amount of thought involved in that change is all the more impressive after he claims to not be of a higher intellectual plane. But to close the album he leaves us with a line that feels like runoff from the feelings evoked by AM, “I’ve done some things that I shouldn’t have done / But I never stopped loving you once.” Acting as the third entry of a trilogy that started with “Star Treatment” and “One Point Perspective,” that tinge of regret bookends the album as a statement on fame, the band and Turner as a person — both in reality and as that taco truck tycoon of a lounge singer.
Few phenom bands age gracefully, and fewer remain relevant as long as Arctic Monkeys have. Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is the first album in the band’s discography that feels reflective, a sign that the band who is known for jumping from style to style is evolving into something new from the inside out. That’s because the band has been aggressively adapting since Whatever People say I Am, That’s What I’m Not — from indie upstarts to slick-suited pop stars and now fictional deep-space has-beens. Tranquility Base might not be their most accessible album, but if a band doesn’t change, they might as well be a covers band. Beyond the songs, aesthetics and British tabloid attention, Arctic Monkeys is a band that refuses to take it easy, not even for a little while.
Craig Wright contributed to this story.
Follow Nick, Craig and Split Tooth Media on Twitter
(Split Tooth may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
