Arctic Monkeys #15 - The Fire and the Thud

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Op maandag 25 februari 2008 21:51 schreef AMDB het volgende:

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Oh jee, waar was je geweest zonder die 2 track CDS. Dan had iedereen je uitgelachen

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Op dinsdag 26 februari 2008 00:57 schreef tim. het volgende:

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Is dat zo'n cd met een radio edit erop? Toch geen gewone single voor verkoop?

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Alex Turner and Miles Kane: The Full Album Story


Alex Turner and Miles Kane have finally named their joint project – and gave NME the first listen to their debut album. The Arctic Monkeys and Rascals frontmen will release their record 'The Age Of The Understatement' as The Last Shadow Puppets on April 21. The title track will be released as a single the week before (April 14).

Taking time out from their day jobs, the pair flew to the Russian capital Moscow last week to shoot a video together, and that's where we caught up with them.

"We've been in Russia – we've done the biggest video ever", declares Kane after a long day on the set. "It's going to look great. The pair of us have been heading around various places in Moscow over the last few days. I won't reveal it all but wait until you see it – it will blow your head".

The exotic location is easily justified by the music the pair have created. Certain to surprise even the most loyal fan, 'The Age Of The Understatement' is a widescreen, glamorous record full of sweeping strings, echoing guitars, tender love songs and some standout vocal performances from them both. With its understated orchestras and exotic soundtrack feel, The Last Shadow Puppets are making pop music in the truest tradition of artists such as Scott Walker and Burt Bacharach.

"They're pop songs, exactly," agrees Turner. "Somebody needs to do proper pop – there's so much of the antithesis of that around now. On the other hand, and not in a nasty way, we're also the opposite of loads who are trying to be dead trashy at the moment – unnaturally trashy."

Pop songs they may be, but even a cursory listen reveals 'The Age Of The Understatement' to be no mere vanity project from an indie superstar – this is a genuine case of two good friends making an album that's inspired purely by their record collections.

"That's the thing," explains Turner. "Those songs came from just us two playing together. We've got these demos from last April with us just on acoustics, just singing them because we're really into it. Because of that we built a good relationship with those tunes even before we recorded them".

"I feel that we really got in and behind that kind of music," agrees Kane. "You can feel the connection we have with it. There's no joking about, it's really meant and really natural."

From the stampeding Spaghetti Western feel of opener and single 'The Age Of The Understatement' – with its frenzied chorus ("Before this attraction ferments/ Kiss me properly and pull me apart") belted out in unison by the duo – it's clear that the interplay between the two is one of its major strengths.

"We discovered our voices went well together really early on and it was one of the things that really spurred us on to make the album," explains Kane, adding that there was no masterplan behind the project, which was recorded with James Ford (who also played drums) last August.
"It was just a natural process all the way through," he explains. "We started by saying, 'Let's write some tunes,' then we thought, 'Let's record them,' so we went to France and did some tunes last summer and each tune we did we thought, 'This is sounding better and better.' It's just grown in its own way, without us thinking about it too much. When you don't, it probably turns out better because there's just been enjoyment in it all the way through, and I think that comes across. There's no thinking behind it other than me and Al are into it."

Other highlights on the record include 'My Mistakes Were Made For You', which finds Turner in full crooner mode, singing effortlessly over a blissful pop tune; the polka-driven 'Separate and Ever Deadly', which finds the pair viciously swapping lines ("Can't you see I'm the ghost in the wrong coat/ Biting butter and crumbs"); and 'Meeting Place', which is a sublime piece of pure Bacharach-esque pop. On the latter song Turner is keen to credit the work of the pair's orchestral collaborator – Arcade Fire associate Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy.

"There's a song called 'Meeting Place' that he really brought to life", says Turner. "When we were recording in France we did come up with some lines, just as initial ideas to send to him. They were quite basic, but he built on that and then he came over for three days in December to record them. We all got together in this hotel room and went through it all. He hasn't worked on too many albums before. He's our age and I think he did a bit on the second Arcade Fire record 'Funeral' and 'Neon Bible' and used to play with them, but I think he was inexperienced enough to have so much excitement for the songs. He know when to leave it out – if it was on all the songs it would be bad – but he knew when we really needed something extra."

With the full album finished last month, the pair had to then come up with a name, having being unofficially known as Turner And Kane for ages.

And despite saying they wanted the word "shadow" in the name somewhere, they admit there isn't really any secret meaning behind it.

"It's The Last Shadow Puppets, because hopefully it means there won't need to be any more Shadow Puppets," laughs Turner.

"It's quire big and dramatic," suggests Kane. "You can look at us as shadow puppets, I guess. We're both in our bands, so this is in our own shadows. It's in our own little world."

Back in the real world, The Rascals release their first single proper 'Suspicious Wit' this week (it was out Monday, February 18). "I fly back from the video shoot and have to go straight up to Liverpool for a gig with The Rascals and then we've got a bit of a tour," explains Kane. "It's been non-stop the last few days, having to go around and set the album up, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it. It's the first time I've had to do this for a record, but it feels good – it's giving me a real taster for The Rascals." However, all the upcoming action with the Liverpool band doesn't mean The Last Shadow Puppets will be a limited project.

"There's a song on the album called 'Separate and Ever Deadly', which we actually did in London after the original sessions," explains Turner. "We thought it was going to be a B-side, but when we'd finished it we knew it had to replace this other track because we're dead excited about it. I think that's good, because if we had done it all in France it might feel like a fluke couple of weeks. It's good that we've got that one because it means hopefully we'll do more in the future."

And that could mean live shows. "We've talked about it, but maybe later on in the year after The Rascals," says Kane. "It's definitely a possibility. It's a living, breathing thing and live it would be brilliant."

"I'm looking forward to it coming out," concludes Turner. "I hope that people get it and understand where we're coming from and why we wanted to do an album like this. I hope they enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it – and I hope we get to play it sometime."

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The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age Of Understatement (release half april; Domino/Munich)
Veel drama, romantiek, blazers, violen en gedragen zang. Alex Turner (Arctic Monkeys) en Miles Kane (Rascals) steken hun nek uit. Resultaat: een rockopera van het hoogste niveau. Heerlijke plaat.

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Op dinsdag 26 februari 2008 17:52 schreef tim. het volgende:

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Waar heb je die gekocht? Bestaat er trouwens ook nog een digipack cd-single van IBYLGOTD?

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Op dinsdag 26 februari 2008 18:29 schreef febster het volgende:

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Dat weet jij wel, ik zat te bedenken dat The Last Shadow Puppets dus ook een single uitbrengen en wellicht wel meerdere, wil dat zeggen dat ze ook nog 5 a 10 nummers als B kanten op de plank hebben liggen of ben ik dan te voorbarig?

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The Last Shadow Puppets: "The Age Of The Understatement"

Yesterday, I watched a DVD of “Love Story”, a documentary about Love and Arthur Lee. It’s not the most elegant piece of film-making I’ve ever seen, but the research and the storytelling of Lee, Johnny Echols, Bryan Maclaine, Jac Holzman (who should have a film devoted to him and Elektra, I think) and many others make it compelling.

One of my favourite parts sees Lee ruefully exploring the Castle, a sprawling and ornate LA mansion that Love somehow came to occupy for a while in the mid ‘60s. Needless to say, the standards of hygiene and interior design weren’t quite as high during their period of residence. Nevertheless, it’s evident that the place had an atmosphere of baroque importance; perhaps, eventually, it contributed to the way Love’s music sounded.

I mention all this because, over the past few days, I’ve been listening to the debut album by Alex Turner and Miles Kane’s new project, The Last Shadow Puppets, and there are one or two tracks on there (“Standing Next To Me”, especially) that remind me of Love; not just in the lavish orchestrations, but in a nebulous sense of grandeur.

Consequently, “The Age Of The Understatement” doesn’t superficially sound much like the Arctic Monkeys, nor – perhaps mercifully – like the little I’ve heard from Kane’s day job, The Rascals. Besides those echoes of Love, the much-vaunted references to Scott Walker (well, the first four solo albums, I should say) prove correct, though yesterday we were also talking about Barry Ryan and “The Days Of Pearly Spencer”. Owen Pallett’s fulsome string arrangements are the most obvious throwback to that era, but it’s also evident in the galloping pace – think “Jacky” - set by the drumming of producer James Ford.

That said, if you were to strip back all this musical extravagance, I suspect you’d find that the essence of Turner’s songwriting remains much the same as it always has been. I think there’s a comparison to be made between the sort of elaborate sentences he favours – not least for bandnames and album titles – and his melodic sense; the way tunes wander quixotically around, sometimes seeming to head off tangentially on a whim.

So “The Age Of The Understatement” itself flies off at a frantic, bombastic pace – very studious allusions to Morricone here, too - but there’s a definite similarity between the opening orchestral flurry and the crashing riff that begins “Brianstorm”. The breakneck clip-clop of “Only The Truth”, the languid stutter of “Chamber”; with a few tweaks, these could comfortably work as Monkeys songs. The buzzing “I Don’t Like You Anymore”, frankly, wouldn’t need much work on it at all.

Turner might be able to change the packaging, but he isn’t yet quite capable of changing the essence of his art. Only the sashaying, Bacharach-esque “The Meeting Place” really breaks the mould. Looking for genetic traces here, you could feasibly spot something of Kane’s Liverpudlian forebears The Pale Fountains in this one (Mick Head not being averse to a bit of Love himself in his time, of course).

Two points to make about all this, I suppose. One: it’s probably no bad thing that Turner’s melodic idiosyncracies survive the transition, when he’s still coming up with songs as swaggeringly excellent as “Calm Like You”. Considering the standard of so much over-reaching indie that’s aspired to precisely reconstruct those Scott albums in the past, we should be grateful. Two: I figure we shouldn’t ascribe all of this to Turner and consequently underestimate the input of Kane. There’s a distinct parallel between The Last Shadow Puppets and The Raconteurs, not least in the way Turner and Kane swap vocals and, at times, are virtually indistinguishable from one another.

If there’s one more major difference between this and the Arctic Monkeys, though, it’s that, for all its paciness and supposed poppiness, “The Age Of The Understatement” is nowhere near as immediately striking as much of those Monkeys albums. On first listen, it struck me as a meticulous, gilded object, blessed with some lovely music (the brooding orchestral coda to “Black Plant”, say), but lacking truly great songs.

Half-a-dozen listens on, though, I’m won over. These songs are baroque, bejewelled puzzles that reveal their charms slowly, a little like some of the denser stuff at the rear end of “Favourite Worst Nightmares”. It’d be easy to presume that Turner (oh, and Kane) had over-extended himself here; tried to grow up too quickly, perhaps. Surely, he couldn’t be critically involved in another set of strong songs so soon? Well, he has. A fine record.