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Arctic Monkeys

2/5
Humbug
Because the Arctic Monkeys appeared so fully formed on their 2006 instant-hit debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, it’s hard to see Alex Turner as a man of many moods. On that first album and its sound-alike follow-up, Favourite Worst Nightmare, Turner set his sly accounts of nights spent down the pub against an appealingly scrappy garage-rock attack that hardly seemed to reflect the nascent noodlings of a budding musical magpie. Here was a guy, you figured, who could go on making records exactly like these forever, as long as he continued to drink too much and view others’ motives with suspicion.

Yet last year, with side project The Last Shadow Puppets, Turner revealed his unexpected knack for ’60s-style orchestral pop; now, on the Monkeys’ third long-player, he’s pulling a left-field stoner-metal move. Turner and his bandmates made half of Humbug in California with Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age, who beefed up the guitars and set the tempo control to boogie (Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford helmed the other half). Sometimes Homme’s touch works, as in ‘Potion Approaching’, in which Turner sounds great unraveling his louche come-ons over a sleazy robot-rock groove. But the Monkeys are a lyrics-and-melodies band, not a texture-and-mood one, and with the singer’s vocals often buried under layers of guitars and keyboards, much of Humbug conceals the outfit’s special charm. Props for trying, dudes, but better luck next time.
Mikael Wood
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