Arctic Monkeys

Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is at its best when the indulgences and luxuries of the setting are celebrated.

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.

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.

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.

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.