Arctic Monkeys #92 - Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

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Op donderdag 19 april 2018 20:46 schreef Merkie het volgende:
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Op donderdag 19 april 2018 20:46 schreef Merkie het volgende:
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Arctic Monkeys’ frontman Alex Turner is in a darkened room within a rehearsal space in Burbank, Calif. “Just before you called, I was disappearing into a screen,” he says, speaking slowly, choosing his thoughts.

“All the lads are back together to figure out how to play some of these tunes on the new record,” he says through his thick English accent. “I feel like this week, we’ve begun to break through some of it. You start to get a feeling like when you get back on the stage.”

Arctic Monkeys haven’t been on stage together in four years. The U.K. rockers delivered their most commercially successful album to date, AM, in 2013, peaking at No. 6 on the Billboard 200 and earning the band its first Hot 100 hit with “Do I Wanna Know?” (peaking at No. 70 in 2014). But soon after, the quartet -- which includes Matt Helders (drums), Jamie Cook (guitar) and Nick O'Malley (bass) -- surprisingly went on hiatus, as Turner turned his attention to side band with Miles Kane, The Last Shadow Puppets.

On May 11, Arctic Monkeys will reunite for its sixth album, Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino (Domino), in which Turner swaps his guitar for a Steinway and delivers a stream of obscure references to Neil Postman’s Information-Action Ratio and Charles Bukowski over cavernous compositions.

The piano was an unexpected gift for his 30th birthday from a friend: “It was quite a rush, really,” Turner recalls of its unveiling. “Prior to that point I didn’t really have many ideas, and in my memory, that was the point at which they started to come. I really do think sitting at the piano tricked me into writing a lot of this stuff.” He had gotten to a point with the guitar where he knew where everything was going to fall. “Sitting at the piano took me immediately to a different place,” he says. “There are chords that came out, my fingers were falling different places, and the sounds were giving me ideas. That I was the guy sitting at the piano also gave me ideas.”

Turner’s new instrumental playground resulted in Arctic Monkeys’ most ambitious album to date. AM was sonically different from 2011’s Suck It and See, and he was encouraged by that to take yet another turn. “With the commercial success of the last record,” he says with a pause -- briefly tripping over the words “commercial success,” as if it were a foreign phrase -- “I don’t think I felt the pressure of that hanging over the creative process. But there was a pressure, in that we step it up and do something different again -- try and fly high.”

Arctic Monkeys have been flying high since the arrival of the band’s racing 2005 debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, which became the fastest-selling debut album in U.K. chart history upon its release, and earned a Grammy nomination for best alternative music album. On each LP since, Turner established himself as an ingenious lyricist who can cinematically capture a specific moment in time.

All the while, he’s managed to fly relatively under the radar in the public eye, only adding to the allure of anything he’s released. Turner has no presence on social media outside of the band’s promotional- and informational-only posts -- “Technology is worth keeping an eye on,” he warns -- but says if he were to get on any of the apps, he'd likely just share Bukowski excerpts.

The upcoming album's opening track, “Star Treatment,” exposes the inner turmoil Turner felt following the band’s arrival: “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes, now look at the mess you made me make,” he sings. So, then, it comes as no surprise that following the success of AM that Turner found himself wanting to reroute his approach. The songs that follow are so full, and each word so carefully selected, that the messiness he sings of is hardly even a consideration. As a result, the writing on Tranquility is enlightened and evolved to the point of occasionally requiring a Google search for context.

Largely written on his own in the “Lunar Surface” -- his Los Angeles home studio named for the theory of the faked moon landing -- the lyrics have the cadence of poetry and invite annotation. While he’s not especially big on conspiracy theories, he does like “moon stuff” and says, “Once I started, it was hard to put the lid back on the science-fiction lexicon. There was a film [my friends and I] were watching called World On a Wire -- it’s a [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder film -- and that was definitely what pushed me over the edge into, ‘Let’s go and write about another world in order to comment on this one.’”

Tranquility chronicles many of Turner’s observations: technology and its control (“Batphone,” on which he sings about “getting sucked into a hole through a handheld device”), bougie taquerias (“Four Out Of Five”) and modern-day American politics (“Golden Trunks” reimagines the “leader of the free world” as a “wrestler wearing tight golden trunks”), though he avoids overtly sharing his opinion on anything.

“In the past I’ve struggled to find the poetry in [politics] and I think I’ve managed a way to find it this time, with some encouragement,” Turner says. “I’ve always thought that, writing anything that relates to politics, it’s a lot to do with the way you go about it. Being able to write about the power of allusion and suggestion is important to keep in mind.”

The most concise lyric comes courtesy of the ominous-sounding “She Looks Like Fun,” on which Turner recognizes: “There’s no limit to the length of the dickheads we can be.” Elsewhere, there’s the foreboding title track, the more experimental Beatles-inspired “The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip” and the gather-around-the-piano closing ballad “The Ultracheese.”

Turner recorded most of the vocals at home on his Tascam 388, a vintage 8-track, but the songs came alive once the band gathered at France’s La Frette, a studio built within a 19th century mansion that their longtime producer James Ford had wanted to record at. “It was the first time we were all together, and I think what the record got from that was this energy of the band that wasn’t there before,” Turner recalls.

While at La Frette, the group tried to channel the approach that Dion took on Born to Be With You and The Beach Boys on Pet Sounds: “I think over time you just learn that [the magic is made] with a lot of people in the room all at once and everything spilling over all the microphones,” Turner says. “We did a little bit of that on this album, but one day I’d like to go the whole way there.” Turner points to the outro on “Four Out of Five” as an example of Born to Be With You’s influence.

Once Tranquility was done and Turner had landed back on his Lunar Surface, he was quick to task himself with a new project: designing the album’s artwork. A visionary who has a hand in all aspects of his work, he knew he wanted it to mirror, in some way, the album’s title: “I liked the idea of naming [the album] after a place, because to me records that I’ve been in love with and continue to be in love with feel like they’re places that you can go for a while. I very much feel like if [Born to Be With You] were a place I would’ve moved there a long time ago.”

For the album’s name, he plucked the place mentioned on the would-be title track, the fictional Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, on which he sings of “Jesus in the day spa filling out the information form,” because, “That [phrase] seemed like the right name for this family of music.” From there, he began to think about architectural models and started sketching ideas on a piece of graph paper.

“I liked this idea of a six-sided shape, because it was the sixth record,” he relates. “I drew a hexagon, I thought that was a kind of dumb idea, and then two months later I made this spinning thing on top of a Revox tape machine. In between that, there are a lot of things that aren’t the artwork and I made a real mess. But it all makes sense to me now. In the past I’ve definitely had record covers that don’t, to me, represent what’s on the wax, and I certainly don’t feel that way about this one. By the end of it, I think I’d forgotten there even was a record. I’d just gotten obsessed with cardboard.”

With both the album and its artwork done, Turner’s attention is now on Arctic Monkeys’ live return, with tour dates in Europe and North America, including headlining sets at Lollapalooza and Firefly. But, true to form, his tone remains neutral even when speaking about the nearing release date.

“I’m getting intermittently excited throughout these days,” he says, seemingly composed about what’s to come. But as for getting the band back together under a new umbrella of sound? “It feels like it’s been a long time coming.”

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Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 23:12 schreef TRNR het volgende:
Jongens wat heb ik hier zin in

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Op zondag 22 april 2018 17:31 schreef TRNR het volgende:
Each Arctic Monkeys album since their blockbuster 2006 debut has felt like an act of escapology - wriggle out of the straightjacket first, then break your way out of the water tank. 2013's AM saw them emerging to the sound of a standing ovation: a UK Number 1, US Top 10, and such a strong set of songs that it yielded six singles.
For their next trick, the Monkeys have ventured into space, with a thematic, if not exactly conceptual, near-future sci-fi lounge/soul album whose influences mirror Alex Turner's listening tastes circa the second Last Shadow Puppets record, 2016's Everything You've Come To Expect. Throughout, there are shades of Serge Gainsbourg (clipped '60s bass), David Axelrod (rolling grooves), The Beach Boys (watery, staccato Leslie speaker organ stabs) and various hues of David Bowie circa 1973-75.
These tracks have their origins in a series of home-recorded Turner tapes that have been embellished by the other Monkeys - or not (two songs don't even feature the band's rhythm section) - and long-time producer James Ford, plus guests including Zach Dawes (Mini Mansions) and James Righton (formerly of Klaxons). Nonetheless, the spotlight stayed trained on Turner, as he whirls around in his private studio, moving from baritone guitar to piano to Orchestron to Dolceola.
As ever, though, it's on the mike that he truly shines. Breaking free (mostly) from his trademark songs of lust and arch observation, he uses a confessional opening line in Star Treatment ("I just wanted to be one of The Strokes") to then spin a time-warping, fantastical tale wherein he paints himself as a cabaret singer who was "a little too wild in the 70s," as the exotica echoes and twinkles around him.
It's brilliant and surprising stuff, which goes on to succeed in making oblique socio-political commentary both vivid and fun: Golden Trunks riffs on Feel Flows from Surf's Up and imagines the leader of the free world as a wrestler in gilded budgie smugglers; American Sports looks back down to Earth to see an "aura over the battleground states". The album's title is an imagined lunar leisure facility whose parent song features a very friendly receptionist named Mark, keen to help direct your call.
But it's in album standout Four Out of Five that he gentrification of the surface of the moon is fully realised: a yacht rock Moonage Daydream tongue-twister with 10cc harmonies where "cute new places keep on popping up" and the narrator's taqueria is getting "rave reviews". The notion that it may well become an arena/festival singalong is highly amusing.
All in all, the Monkeys' sixth long-player is a bold move. While there's every chance it will shed some fans, being a transitional album like Humbug (though not as hard-going as that record's heavy rifferama was) and basically not AM 2, it buys the group a lot of freedom. As Arctic Monkeys' head album, it's a thing that no one envisaged coming from those callow, Fred Perry-wearing youths of more than a decade ago. In shifting their base to the moon, from here they could go anywhere. To infinity and beyond.

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ArcticMonkeysJP twitterde op zondag 22-04-2018 om 10:44:08 NEW ? https://t.co/pwciuMVJaj reageer retweet

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Op zondag 22 april 2018 21:13 schreef MilanILF het volgende:
https://m.imgur.com/gallery/tXKLj3r

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Op woensdag 25 april 2018 16:32 schreef Xurk het volgende:
Het houdt je bezig. Zo droomde ik dat ik bij een event waar het album aan fans werd uitgereikt. Je moest in een rij wachten en dan kreeg je van Alex Turner een ter plekke door hem bereidde taco, waarna je door mocht lopen en het album in ontvangst kon nemen.

Waarom een taco? Omdat in mijn droom de albumtitel was: "Soft-Shell Tacos with Smushed Peas and Melted Cheese"

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Op woensdag 25 april 2018 16:00 schreef sander26 het volgende:
Aisumasen, we gaan dood van de honger. Voer ons!

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Op woensdag 25 april 2018 21:07 schreef MilanILF het volgende:
Ik check te vaak fok en AMUS of er al meer artikelen zijn of op wonderlijke wijze toch een lek. Het wachten wordt steeds erger. Ik wil ook meer muziek beschrijvingen I.p.v. Lyrics.

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Op donderdag 26 april 2018 11:19 schreef Jacobuspower het volgende:
Over anderhalve maand is het zover, anderhalf uur Arctic Monkeys op Best Kept Secret.

Ondertussen maken alle recensies, interviews en vooral de playlist me steeds meer hyped voor het komende album, ik heb er alle vertrouwen in!

On another note: volgende week kijken/luisteren we rond deze tijd de eerste live-opnames van de nieuwe nummers !

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Op donderdag 26 april 2018 13:23 schreef Jacobuspower het volgende:
Aan andere kant, het is maar een weekje inhouden, en in de tussentijd heb ik de opnames van de oudere nummers dan natuurlijk wel.