A fascinating car ride with the Arctic Monkeys

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Arctic Monkeys’ seventh album confirms that the British band is at the peak of its maturity. The Car is a record that musically looks to the past, the perfect soundtrack for a journey into the sunset. Its nostalgic and evocative character is enchanting.
“It’s me and no one else. Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not,” says Arthur Seaton, the novel’s protagonist Saturday evening, Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe. The book was published in 1951, and fifty-five years later a joke in it became the title of the fastest selling debut album in the UK. Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not with his teenage fury he made the Arctic Monkeys known to the whole world.

Alex Turner

Since that 2006 Alex Turner and his bandmates have come a long way and have quickly disengaged from any labeling, while maintaining a rock orientation. Self Favorite Worst Nightmare of 2007 was still tied to the sound of the debut, already in Humbugreleased two years later, the Arctic Monkeys sound was infatuated by the desert mirages produced by Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age. After this first turning point, the quartet, rounder and less angular than at the beginning, worked Suck It and Seewhich prepared the ground for the masterpiece AMreleased in 2013. And then, five years later, lo and behold Tranquility Base Hotel & Casinoanother fascinating detour.

The seventh studio album

The Car is the seventh studio album by the Arctic Monkeys and is related to its predecessor. There are sumptuous strings, a writing worthy of the best French chansonniers, a crooner’s singing that revolves around a melancholic soul warmth. There is irony, introspection and miles of film that capture the everyday. But, deeper down, the atmospheres of The Car are populated by all the past sonic incarnations of the band and by a retrospective, not very indulgent, which meanders in the form of a question in a verse of Sculptures Of Anything: “Is that vague sense of nostalgia trying to make a scene?” To introduce us to the world of The Car is cinematic There’d Better Be A Mirrorballfollowed by I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am, an iridescent dance floor full of style. In Body Paint echoes the epic dimension of David Bowie, while the dreamy Big Ideas seems to be written by a melancholy Burt Bacharach. hello you is probably the crystallization of Turner’s compositional talent, a timeless jewel followed by the introvert Mr Schwartzwhich anticipates the final perfect sense.

The Car it’s not a pop album, in the sense that there are no easily memorized choruses or captivatingly structured songs. Instead, it is a precious disc because, in a historical period founded on distraction, it demands attention. In fact, it should be listened to in its entirety, in that succession of pieces that open up like a polychrome fan. To fully enjoy it, however, one must be aware of disappointing the expectations of Alex Turner, who inaugurates The Car chanting, “Don’t get carried away by emotion.”