Anyone expecting another AM, or more songs about taxi ranks and shit nightclubs, is going to be disappointed. Anyone wanting to hear a sad, funny, wordy and imaginative album about paranoia and alienation, however, is in for a treat.
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino feels more like an interlude between AM and a seventh Arctic Monkeys album – a delve into the bizarre, where even the Steinway has its own character.
The music is stark and edgy, with inflections from doo-wop and heavy rock. Songs are ephemeral, and not easy to decipher without listening to them repeatedly.
Once you ditch the notion that AM’s successor should rock like it, and give yourself up to rolling around in the psyche of one of our very greatest songwriters like an olive in a martini, then it’s a riveting and immersive listen – an album-bomb dropped without preceding singles, re-emphasising the importance of a cohesive work, rather than a shuffled, Spotified deconstruction.
Before you write this off as exhausting or pretentious self-indulgence, give it a listen or two. Peruse the lyrics, dissect them and have a laugh. Commitment isn't as scary as you think.
Should Arctic Monkeys remain cozily in that era forever, no one should fault them. And yet, unlike many nauseatingly nostalgic acts today, it never sounds pastiche.
Sit back and venture into the self-directed ballet of The Ultracheese and listen to the most ambitious album Alex Turner has written to date.
This record feels a lot like gazing into the night sky. At first it’s completely overwhelming ... But when the constellations show through, you’ll realise that it’s a product of searingly intelligent design.
Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino may not be a fan favourite, but years from now, people will point to this as a seminal moment of the band’s career and a moment where Alex Turner rightfully accepted his crown as a lyrical genius.
Even for a band who've managed to reinvent themselves more or less with every album, Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino sees the Sheffield lads match pace with Turner's lyrics to take a dive down the rabbit hole.
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is at its best when the indulgences and luxuries of the setting are celebrated.
Whilst your first few visits to the ‘Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino’ may feel alien and unwelcoming, you will gravitate ever closer to its shimmering outer-space treasures with each stay.
If you can come to terms with the fact Alex Turner is now a goateed Hollywood aesthete, and not the chippy Lacoste-wearing Yorkshire upstart you fell in love with ten years ago, there’s plenty to enjoy here.
This is a record that is massively of-a-piece, that glides by at a deliberate pace, and on which any given individual track wouldn’t work outside of the musical context that the others around it provide it.
The album is audacious in its conceptual conceit, challenging expectations established through the boozy nightlife anthems of the band's earlier work with an experimental approach that's contemplative and unrepentantly abstruse.
Easily the weirdest record in the band’s catalog, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a fun, flawed aberration (at least, for now).
Written and recorded in a large part by the singer alone in his LA studio, it’s all either genius or the sound of a man unravelling.
At turns thrilling, smug, clever and oddly cold, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is only a qualified success.
There is some lyrical filler here – Turner sometimes seems to free-associate sounds the way Basement Tapes-era Dylan would, waiting until the slant-rhymes lead him to something profound – but at its best Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino offers an unprecedentedly personal look at Turner’s experience.
Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino is the best possible kind of average record, one that goes out swinging. One that goes for it on every level. A record that, although it isn’t great by any typical metric, is extremely curious and entertaining.
Despite the huge burden of expectation, Turner and co. sound cocksure on TBH&C. Sadly, this doesn’t equate to anything resembling brilliance.
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino will be written off as a daring diversion for the Arctic Monkeys, a bold career move that deliberately spells out commercial suicide. It's not the first time a band of this stature chooses to find their confidence by taking it slow. But neither is it too daring or too unhinged; in fact, sans the slower, more methodical tempos, many of the songs still fall under their common pairing of doo-wop chord progressions and piercing guitars.
Although Turner cranks up the rakish charm, in the form of falsetto (“Golden Trunks”) and Morrissey-esque, clenched-jaw self-effacement (“She Looks Like Fun”), the album feels unmoored and even plodding due to a lack of structure.
With Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino, Arctic Monkeys aim for an admirably weird space-age lounge sound, but often the execution leaves something to be desired.
Arctic Monkeys are a great band who've made a ton of good music and in the tradition of lodestars like Cohen, Bowie or Lou Reed, who certainly weren't without making the occasional ill-considered left turn, they've tried a stylistic change up that doesn't quite work. No shame in that. Sometimes restless artistry has a price.
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino really is just one small step in what is clearly meant to be a giant leap for the band.
1st listen: “this is shit”
6th listen: “this is the shit”
My relationship with this band is extremely rocky to say the least, but this is the monkey boys’ magnum opus.
I can totally understand why anyone would take a bite of this and projectile vomit on the nearest family member. It’s such a radical departure from anything this band has done, and maybe will ever do, and that’s a large contributing factor in why I love this record so much. It’s ... read more
Di...did anyone see this coming? From the arena sized AM to a sci-fi lounge-jazz concept album? No one saw it coming, and in some cases, that's why it works so well. It's so off the wall, it's so out of the blue, it's so right out of left field that it's almost a rock enigma. And it's a glorious enigma to say the lest.
Favorite Jams: Four Out Of Five, American Sports, She Looks Like Fun
Lest Favorite: The World's First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip (even though that's a great title)
Underappreciated lounge pop that really grows on you. The Arctic Monkeys' fundamentals are just so damn good– and they've got both the riffs and cache to pull this off. Besides being one of the biggest musical left turns of the last decade, it's a startingly surreal record, full of lyrical satire and sly cynicism. Oddly enough this is what I feel Billy Joel's Piano man would've ended up singing, instead of some boundlessly optimistic shit– just tired and annoyed, and resigned to the ... read more
They could have done more with this music style in my opinion. However, the rockier stuff definitely suits them better overall. It's not a bad album, but it doesn't really do it for me either.
1 | Star Treatment 5:54 | 87 |
2 | One Point Perspective 3:28 | 85 |
3 | American Sports 2:38 | 82 |
4 | Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino 3:31 | 85 |
5 | Golden Trunks 2:53 | 73 |
6 | Four Out Of Five 5:12 | 90 |
7 | The World's First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip 3:00 | 75 |
8 | Science Fiction 3:05 | 78 |
9 | She Looks Like Fun 3:02 | 77 |
10 | Batphone 4:31 | 81 |
11 | The Ultracheese 3:37 | 84 |
#1 | / | Q Magazine |
#1 | / | The Observer: Kitty Empire |
#2 | / | MOJO |
#2 | / | NME |
#2 | / | The Independent |
#3 | / | Uproxx |
#4 | / | BBC Radio 6 Music |
#4 | / | Gaffa (Denmark) |
#5 | / | Entertainment Weekly |
#5 | / | OOR |