Arctic Monkeys Make Triumphant Return in Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino

What a different world we live in from even just the last album The Arctic Monkeys released in 2013. While Alex Turner, the band’s lead signer and lyricist, had released new music since then under the moniker of The Last Shadow Puppets with Miles Kane, it didn’t quite feel like there was a gnawing lack of Arctic Monkeys music. Yet a few months after the announcement of a new album, as the wait crept on, lingering questions began to eat away at the canon: Would the new album divide fans? Would it address contemporary politics in an unfulfilling way? Would it be any good?

Fortunately for fans old and new, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a great Arctic Monkeys album. Turner’s biting lyrics and increasingly cosmopolitan sense for melody and rhythm have gently matured into a well rounded album that is clearly influenced by his evolving tastes in his side project, TLSP, along with a simultaneous verge towards their own version of pop while re-embracing the raw and sappy elements from their freshman and sophomore albums, Whatever You Say I Am That’s What I’m Not and Favourite Worst Nightmare.

Turner has turned down his need to be a provocateur for provocateur’s sake, reserving his stand alone lyrics that used to plop down like a sack of potatoes for softer moments, sprinkling them over his bandmates’ melodies like a Cordon Bleu Chef with just the right pinch of parsley.

“I saw this aura over the battleground states / I lost the money, I lost the keys / But I’m still handcuffed to the briefcase,” Turner suddenly remarks in “American Sports,” which is the most commentary you’ll get out of him regarding the election of Donald Trump.

How to open the album to such anticipation and impending criticism, one may ask?

“I just wanted to be one of The Strokes. Now look at the mess you made me make,” Turner sings as the first lyrics of the album’s opener, “Star Treatment.”

Despite having the tough task of batting clean-off, “Star Treatment” is the longest and most sonically complex song on the album, and though perhaps unlikely to emerge as the album’s single (of which there were none released prior to today's release), it is one of their best standalone songs since Favourite Worst Nightmare.

Another feat on the new album comes in the six slot with “Four out of Five,” offering some of the best musical commentary on the so-called Gig Economy that modern indie rock has to offer.

“Cute new places keep on popping up / Since the exodus, it's all getting gentrified / I put a taqueria on the roof, it was well reviewed / Four stars out of five / And that's unheard of.”

It’s also important to note that the studio has chosen the hook and melody from this song to play in most promos for the latest album.

Another curious aspect of the release is that this is the first full-length album by Arctic Monkeys to have a setting of any sort indicated other than cursory allusions to Sheffield, their hometown in England ("Fake Tales from San Francisco” aside).

If your musical niche happens to be baroque love songs, then “She Looks Like Fun” and “Batphone” are the hits you’ve been waiting for. Is “She Looks Like Fun” a commentary on the Me Too movement? Given that we’re dealing with Turner, it’s too tough to tell, but maybe the lucky music reporter who lands an interview with the band will be the first to find out.

The album concludes strongly with “The Ultracheese,” a quintessential last-call Arctic Monkeys tune tailored to wistful nostalgia. Is this song too cheesy, even for a seasoned Arctic Monkeys listener?

How could it be?

“Oh, the dawn won’t stop weighing a ton / I’ve done some things that I shouldn’t have done / But I haven’t stopped loving you once.”

The album goes down smoothly and even sweetly upon a first listen, but subsequent experiences with it will reveal a bit more of an odyssey that the Arctic Monkeys take. For example, they technically don’t arrive at the titular casino and hotel until the fourth song, so what exactly is happening on the road before then? What’s in this suitcase Turner keeps referring to, and what does it say about his feelings towards the commerce of music?

The work as a whole calls for a look beneath appearances and a reexamination of difficult personal pasts. “Don’t you know an apparition is a cheap date?” “I just wanted to be one of those ghosts / You thought that you could forget / And then I haunt you via the rear view mirror.”  “So who you gonna call? The martini police?”

While Turner’s genius can be felt throughout the album, producer James Ford along with bandmates Jamie Cook on guitar, Nick O’Malley on bass, and Matt Helders on drums not only bring the ensemble performance together, but offer such craftsmanship that focusing on just one element during each song can be as enjoyable as any of Turner’s tricks.

Once you’re done with the album, pour one out for poor Mark at the front desk of the Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, who has to deal with Turner rambling to him on the phone about “Technological advances really bloody get me in the mood” and “Do you celebrate your dark side / then wish you’d never left the house? / Have you spent a generation trying to figure that one out?”

Any new music from a beloved band can be hard to accept initially, but what makes Arctic Monkeys one of the great bands of their generation and proper inheritors of The Beatles and Rolling Stones' legacy is that they continue to innovate on the margin of risk that they may disappoint their fans. Fortunately for Turner & company, no such concerns are required at this casino and hotel.