AM

So uh…3000 followers.

That’s beyond nuts to me. Realistically, this is a milestone that, frankly, should not have been met. I think I've only posted a couple of reviews per year, maybe put out a handful of lists but mainly just stuck to rating stuff i’ve heard. To get to 3K from basically doing what I would consider the bare minimum is, by no means, insanity. Thanks to everyone for checking out the reviews when they do come in, and thanks to everyone who has been patiently waiting for new music, new reviews, new lists, new anything. It genuinely means the world to me after all this time that people are still interested in what a goofy New Zealand dude has to say about music.

When I started this, my goal wasn’t really to become a well known critic or a critical writer, but to find out what it is that I personally love about music so when I went to make my own, I knew what to incorporate and what not to, what aesthetic I enjoyed and what musical decisions I didn’t, and now thanks to this lovely community, not only have I gained the confidence and inspiration to try my hand at music under the name Ryan Benis, but I’m also being able to get real feedback because of it. As well, being able to practise writing here let me experiment when it came to writing scripts, adding subtest and needless characterisation (maybe to my detriment sometimes) to reviews on fucking Will of the People. It’s silly, yes, but writing is writing. So, again, I thank every single one of you who has stood by and made it so that I do want to genuinely keep posting here. Hell, I’ve taken so long to upload this review, the account is now at 3100! What the fuck, I didn’t do ANYTHING!!! WHERE HAVE 100 OF YOU COME FROM???

In particular, some people I wanna shout-out who have been with me during probably the worst years of my life, in no particular order: @MxVA , @elitimesfour , @Plats , @koner1 , @Cakemate , @MickyT, @Nostalgia , @LuckLoose , @joshxxi , @Toasterqueen12 , @Wessel_ , @notmike0 , @Schaefersea , my friends off the site who I adore and thank for putting up with my bullshit, as well as my significant twat for a good portion of three years now, my amazing partner @CLJesse (love ya!).

If I'm being honest, as nowadays being transparent, open and honest ‘publicly’ is a hard thing for me (ain’t that a different state of mind from around 2 years ago!), it's been a rocky couple of years for me. I’ve been personally going through a giant, almost unending depressive and anxiety attack due to personal events in my life in 2021, and I’m gonna be honest, it’s still very much kicking my ass. Don’t worry; I've been working on myself and moving past those, frankly, traumatic moments since then, going on and off to therapy and surrounding myself with people who support and, most importantly, ground me in reality, and more recently been trying to put a lot of that negativity into music, with a new Benis project coming very, very soon!

And, on top of that, as I approach 22 years old, for me, a lot of how I want to spend my free time has become very different. I don’t really have time to make frequent reviews like I used to, as well as juggling a final year of college, various creative ventures and trying to find my own place as a young adult. It’s all becoming a little time consuming, so to feel like there’s still this underlying idea that I’m even slightly relevant on this website despite the fact that I very much, on the outside, am doing jackshit, feels very emotional for me. Like I said, with the trajectory of this account, this milestone should not have been met, and yet it did. And I'm very thankful.

…alright, now to defend mid.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE PIPEPANIC OVERLY LONG 3000 FOLLOWER SPECIAL!

-----------------------------------------------------------PRELUDE: What The Fuck is the AM?--------------------------------------------------------

Before I essentially dipped from making reviews on basically every album I listened to, I tried to review one band's discography at a time. Nowadays, I just make lists and mini-reviews within those lists (check them out, i’m very pleased with them!) if I want to go in depth on an artist's discography, but sometimes I look back at some of those long form discography binges I did back then and wonder “...yeah maybe I should keep doing those sometimes, huh?.”. So, I decided to relook at the British Funny Teeth band, the band who now basically write lounge versions of I’m Just Ken, the biggest boy band from Sheffield since The Human League, Arctic Monkeys. Hell, it had it’s 10th birthday the other month, why not! (that’ll show you how long I’ve fucking taken writing this)

And last time I reviewed those sick little twerps, they had just come off one of their sleepiest and inconsistent records to date; “Suck it And See”, or “Slumber and Sleep” as I sometimes like to call it. While the fourth record saw the band try to go into a more stripped down landscape, to take out a lot of the studio production trickery of albums like Humbug and deliver a more direct and raw message to their audience of how they have matured over the years. Which, on paper, is a fine idea and one that I can get behind, and while it is one of my least favorite records from the band, I have grown to appreciate its more lowkey and melodic approach. Sure, most of those ‘mature songs’ they were making just sort of paled in comparison to literally every track they made previously, incorporating mid-tempo, glacial paced love song sleeper tracks that were trying to be more ‘classic love songs’ but came off more like the bands b-sides, but melodically, structurally and even lyrically, they were as strong as ever. It’s not that ‘Suck It And See’ was actively bad, just a little inconsistent, and coming from Humbug, that did bite a little harder, even when the end product wasn’t bad at all. Just very different in ethos.

So, when the band decided that they were going to try and go into a more ‘rock centric’ sound, the fans were damn excited. The band were declaring the album would be self-titled, in a loose sense, saying “this is exactly where we need to be right now” to Zane Lowe, almost calling the album ‘The New Black”, referring to a new aesthetic and the fact they are back in the studio and making the best music they could possibly make. A cooler, less geeked up Arctic Monkeys was on the horizon. The slicked back hair, the leather jackets, the motorcycles, taking inspiration from everything from Outkast to Black Sabbath, using new instruments like piano, organ, celeste, a Hohner Guitaret, and a vintage drum machine. This was gonna be THE Arctic Monkeys to end all AM records. Where the crazy punk influences finally got the huge radio hit that they really needed to destroy the minds of the youth.

…and it’s an album I have an odd relationship with.

Not to make mountains of molehills, but when you’re the band that released ‘Favorite Worst Nightmare’, releasing ‘AM’ as your comeback to real rock is honestly kind of confusing. Lots of mid-tempo slosh, hazy production, harder songs that didn’t feel very hard, and just this black and white aesthetic glaze that is hard to pin down as it is even harder to stand out. Honestly, this might be one of my most personal reviews because…well, this is the album that got me into getting into music. No joke, no gag, ‘AM’ really opened my eyes into trying to get into music properly, being one of the first albums I distinctly called ‘my favorite album’. And you see my score for this album, that’s a far cry from what I think today!

So, what the fuck is ‘AM’, and why was it my favorite album as a kid?

-----------------------------------------------------------PART ONE: If You Were There, Beware--------------------------------------------------------------
(The Background)

Well, the first thing I think is important to note is that with me and this album, there is HISTORY. That’s right kids, sit down, it’s time for some Ryan Benis Lore to be told. Let me take you to the long and mystical time of 2013. In a couple of months, this moment I’ll tell you about will be 10 years ago. Can you believe it?

Because I fucking cant.

It all started at my school's local TV network. At the wonderfully flawed school of [REDACTED] Intermediate, me and my best friend (who you might recall from my Origin of Symmetry review as Jason) ran a local news station for our school where it was basically just students telling other students what big school events were coming up. It was relatively uneventful, but being able to do it, as an avid film student, was bliss for me and my friends. Occasionally, we’d be able to pick the music that plays right before the broadcast, and for Jason, that meant a LOT. He’d ruminate over what he could/couldn’t play (sadly, Asking Alexandra or Misfits were not permitted to be played), and would usually come to school with some selection of punk/rock music that I’d really like. The ones I remember distinctly was ‘Uprising’ by Muse, ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes and…uh… ‘Come With Me Now’ by Kongo. Why is this important? Well, on one eventful day, he brought in ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ by Arctic Monkeys, a band he had mentioned a couple of times but never really got into or heard anything from.

Now, keep in mind, my understanding of music at this point had come from the land of Minecraft parodies, Will.I.Am and the occasional song my dad or mom would play in the car (i.e. Queen, Abba, Gorillaz, Crazy Frog, you know, the classics). I was only really ready to accept a band like Muse into my life, whereas anything else seemed intimidating or like another world. Basically, I was an uncultured swine, but that’s fine, I was in intermediate (or middle school for those who LiVe ThE CaLL oF dUtY viDEoGaMeS!!1!).

So, when ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ started, with its kick and snare echoing through the halls and guitar riff melodically soothing my ears, I paid close attention. It was like all of the garage rock and punk my friend had shown me, but it felt…like pop music. It felt like I could see this on TV, or being played in big arenas. Sure, it wasn’t as loud as some other music my friend had shown me, but there was a real beat to it, A real groove, something that made me wanna dance. It didn’t really feel dangerous, it just felt right. It stayed in my head for weeks after, and I was so interested in it, I sought the album out immediately.

After skimming the album on first listen, it was something that, at the time, just wasn’t around, at least in the mainstream. Keep in mind, this was in 2013. Sure, if you were in the know and looking at music as a music nerd, there was amazing rock music that was definitely kicking AM’s ass, but within mainstream radio, rock music had been dying out for a while. For me, this was the year of The Weeknd beginning his reign on pop radio, The 1975, Twenty One Pilots exploding with Vessel, Fall Out Boy were trying to ‘Save Rock and Roll’ and were more synthetic than ever, Paramore went pop in a much better way then Fall Out Boy ever could while Taylor Swift reached peak pop. Hell, the wave of increasingly experimental Hip Hop releases were changing things rapidly, so it was a weird, weird year, especially for Rock.

So to say blues inspired rock music on the radio was a rarity was an understatement. And somehow, fucking SOMEHOW, Arctic Monkeys, out of nowhere, released one of the biggest albums of the year that would honestly inspire more Rock based songs on the radio in 2014. And the album came out in September.

But again, if you knew where to look, great rock music was coming out, of COURSE there was. Nine Inch Nails, The Dillinger Escape Plan, David Bowie, Sigur Ros, Queens Of The Stone Age were all kicking fucking ass, of course they were, and in the underground was stuff like Nails, Nouns, Touche Amore, Savages, Melt-Banana, Deafheaven, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, etc. By no means was Arctic Monkeys the best coming out. But for me, I didn’t know where to look. I was 14, wondering what was even considered music and what I liked. I didn’t know where to start, so something like ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ was like a light. It was the in I was looking for. And, despite all of it’s shortcomings, it was fucking catchy, and had absolutely no right to be.

…so why do I feel the way I do now?

--------------------------------------------------------------------PART TWO: Bad Sounds----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(The Production and Mixing)

I feel weird reviewing things now. To be fair, even when I was doing it consistently, I felt weird about it. Putting numbers to records is, on one hand, extremely helpful to figure out what I liked and didn’t like about a certain album, but also puts this weird final stamp on my thoughts and feelings on a record. Before this process, an album would stick around, even if I didn’t like it at first, and then it would either become one of my favorites or fade into the background. The more I gave an album, the more I would like it, or at the very least the more I could understand what it was that bothered me. Hell, that’s what I did for my favorite albums now. The Downward Spiral straight up scared me at first, The Seer confused the hell outta me at first listen, I didn’t get what was so amazing about Atrocity Exhibition or Remain in Light until so much later in life, even if I did get very fascinated by it.

And on the flipside, even if it's not the cool thing to say, but sometimes albums I’d gush about on first listen, when I looked more closely didn’t really impact me in the same way. Remember when I liked Dream Theater? Yeah, I can't stand it now. Remember when I liked stuff like Simulation Theory, American Idiot, Cuz I Love You, that one Rich Brian album? Don't do it for me now. Hell, The Melodic Blue by Baby Keem grew on me over time, I just needed to give it more listens to understand what it was that initially set me off..And now, I’m in a weird place where I like giving records time, space and energy. I find it more interesting to pop in for 3-4 listens before really giving a sat down opinion.

That’s why doing reviews, especially new releases, just tires me out. I’m not shitting on anyone that does this of course, not at all! I participate in this very thing myself, even recently. That Swans review nearly killed me, listening to it 3 times over the course of 8 hours to try and get out something, anything before the deadline of ‘the actual release of the album’ so that I can hit that 100+ likes sweet spot. Now, looking back, there's details there that I wish I could add to, stuff I wish I could say about giving the album time to grow and even shrink in some aspects. Because, if i’m honest, that’s how I feel about albums now.

Because, if i’m being honest with myself, putting numbers on records really puts me in a tough situation to say “this is good” or “this is bad”, definitively. Guilty pleasures aren’t guilty pleasures anymore, they just become records I don’t like. Records that are technically sound but don’t really leave me anywhere emotionally become really good, as on first listen, they impress me, hence a 90+ on records that I might not love as much the next day. As silly as it is to complain that “I don’t want to rate stuff!” when I have enough ratings and reviews to fill out a whole book, this process, something I used to use to figure out, remember and log albums I’ve listened to, can sometimes be in contrast to what I actually like in art, which is finding the emotion in it, and ironically enough it made me too critical to really let myself figure out what that piece of art means to me and WHY I like it.

…so what the fuck does any of that have to do with this Home Depo Sounding Ass album?

Well, thinking about that number puts me in a weird place. If I were to look critically and harshly, yeah, I can see why everyone calls this album mid. Because look what’s out there, from all the other Garage Rock in the world, from all of the other Rock Albums out there, from all of the other Arctic Monkeys albums! Compare any song from AM to a song like ‘If You Were There, Beware’, a song like ‘From The Ritz To The Rubble’, hell, like a song like ‘Library Pictures’, a song they released two years before hand and you can see just how much this ‘big rock revival’ and weep in just how much this band doesn’t have the same punch when they are trying to make that big ruckus.

…and you know what, let's get specific, what is it about the mix, the production that makes it feel like that?

Songs like ‘Arabella’, ‘I Want It All’ and ‘R U Mine?’, from a compositional standpoint are almost there, but the production sucks out a lot of it’s energy, being too studio polished to feel dangerous and being too live and raw to feel like the bands later attempts at a more controlled studio sound. Producer James Ford (who is basically the other member of Arctic Monkeys) and Ross Orton (who has worked with both The Fall and M.I.A., so this collaboration just makes sense) were really trying to go for that combo of vintage and future, and I can respect that a lot, but what we got was the Villains by Queens of the Stone Age problem: It’s trying to be a punk record that’s also being recorded by Mark Ronson, and while that aids the slower songs quite a lot, that means the more alive songs sound too muted, too fixed up to make me bounce across the wall like they should.

As the years go by, and their sound changes, it’s clear that what Arctic Monkeys wanted was to make music like ‘The Car’ or ‘Tranquility Base’, but this strange in between time from ‘punk maniacs’ to ‘orchestral crooners’ feels just very…wishy washy at best. In some cases and contexts, I get it. They wanted go combine the slower, cooler Hip Hop sound of Jay-Z with the ‘bAdAsS rOcK’ of The Kinks to create something that was The Ultracool, which is an ambition that I think could work well on paper, but with this concept and aesthetic in mind, most of this material comes off, when you look at it from a wider scope, like the types of songs you’d hear in a Car Commercial.

…ain’t that a buzz word when talking about bad Garage Rock. Car Commercial music. Is that even a negative statement?

You know what, I should probably just use ‘R U Mine?’ as a key example, the lead single from AM and THE hype song from the album.. It’s the song that really kicks the energy into high gear, or at least trying to with Alex Turner even saying to Zane Lowe in 2013, “The record sort of started with ‘R U Mine?’ really. [We] discovered something through the recording of that tune that we thought was worth exploring.”. This song is the one that made ‘AM’ feel like ‘AM’ to the band, with a more prominent punk energy than any of the singles from ‘Suck It And See’. It’s faster and meaner than every other song on AM, taking influence from Hip Hop on a vocal end, while the main riff sounds a little more classic rock n’ roll, blues, maybe even desert rock inspired. And, in pure technical terms, this is the song where drums are the ‘craziest’ and most ‘fast’, utilizing a lot more fills and crash cymbals. Which hey, I’m A Whore For A Good Crash Cymbal™, do not get me wrong, but again, it’s hard not to hear this and think “...this is the craziest song on the album? Like, if this was on Favorite Worst Nightmare, this would be one of the more lowkey tracks on the whole album! Why is this band clearly slowing down? Is it age? Is it their new popularity? Do they just not care?!”

Well, I don’t think it’s any of those things, but I’ll get more into that in a second.

Getting back on point, the production ain’t doing any favors to the song, especially in the drums. I’m gonna be real, the drums on this album, not just this song, all fucking blow ass. I hate to be that negative, but whoever engineered these drums? No. Bad job, nuh uh. According to an article exploring the creation of this sound, the rhythm section was recorded first, with bass and drums creating the basics of the songs, with all other parts built around this rhythmic crux. And hey, that’s not a bad idea at all, but what that equates to is now all other aspects on the album sound slapped together, and that is no more apparent then on this track. The drums are so huge and almost clipping the mic in some cases, which again, sounds great on paper, but it’s making the guitars and bass not really have all that much staying power in the mix because…well, they are just kind of there. Sure, if you want to make a bit of noise, having the drums be front and center ain’t a bad idea, especially when that second verse is just drum, bass and vocal, but if we expand the view a little, if i’m being honest, I’ve seen that work with plenty of big rock albums way better.

This might not be the best example, but Lightning Bolt is able to do this exact thing of loud booming drums, all without losing impact on the other aspects of the music. Take a song like ‘Air Conditioning’, where the bass and drums are working in perfect sync with each other to great a big, noisy treat of energetic beats, riffs and vocal takes. Or, if you want a more mainstream rock example, take a look at a song like ‘No One Knows’ by Queens of The Stone Age. Dave Grohl is beating the ever loving fuck out of those drums, but that does not mean it’s the only thing going on to create the noise, The bass, guitars and vocals are all in tandem with each other, especially in that chorus, where a little bit more grit in the guitar comes through with those big, bright chords come through. It’s gloriously loud yet stupendously cool.

Am I saying that, from a songwriting standpoint, Arctic Monkeys should be writing songs like ‘No One Knows’ by Queens of the Stone Age or fucking ‘Air Conditioning’ by goddamn Lightneing Bolt? Fucking God No! But the current mix of this song, it means that, despite the fact that compositionally it has great dynamics and some nice vocal passages, the production of the track is just keeping it with that big drum sound and…not much else.The best part of the mix, by far for me, is that mini-solo collection where it’s just one instrument at a time, popping in and out of the mix to combine at the end of Alex's acapella bit. It’s a great showcase of how, when focusing on each instrument, the mix can collapse into this huge culmination of a big rock spectacle that sounds great! But the song just keeps that one note, and keeps it strong, and this affects nearly every song on here.

The most egregious mix of the lot is ‘Fireside’ a song that, because of it’s acoustic dynamics, never feels as emotional as it should and never as energetic and a full blown acoustic banger like, say, a Radiohead song. Again, not saying that Arctic Monkeys should become Radiohead, but with a song like ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’, the acoustic elements mix into the song along with a more crunchy song, these hypnotizing backing vocals, this groovy yet subtle raw bassline. The acoustic guitar helps add this percussive element to make the song stamp a little harder, and it's clear that everything added into the song, from the synths to the strings to the electric guitar, are all in service of adding to this song, to keep the drive going so by the time you get to this beautiful bridge, it feels like this rush and euphoria that makes you go back to.

And I feel like that core idea is what a song like ‘Fireside’ is going for, but the whole song feels like it’s got this extra layer of compression, particularly on the drums that makes this song just sound disorganized. You’ve got those main ideas down, of the more melodic acoustic guitar adding a more rhythmic, percussive element to the song, while the drum combines with it to make a more flowing sound, like a ball of percussion. But with Josh Homme’s “shoo-up” vocals being caked in this vocoder effect (which Turner has admitted that it went to the extent of chopping up his vocals syllable by syllable on Pro Tools in order to piece together the perfect take, good job Alex, this really is that raw and dirty rock album you wanted to make), these admittedly nice sounding synths, and the bass just going ham, the mix is trying for this open, dynamic sound, but feels so compressed and crushed together.

For brevity's sake, I'm not gonna go into every song like this, but this more dynamic mix does mute what could’ve been a very exciting rock record, at least in it’s bigger moments. You can also feel this in songs like ‘Arabella’, which also has that “I know how to make this song loud, lets crank the drums up to max!” problem ‘R U Mine?’ has,, ‘Do I Wanna Know, which takes the problems I complained about before and takes that to the extreme, ‘Why’d You Only Call Me When You're High’.

There are exceptions, sure. ‘I Want It All’ mix does have this admittedly fun loudness in it’s guitars that, while the clap drums do get a little bit irritating as the song goes on (again, ALL the drum sounds on this album BLOW), this does feel like it’s the albums first attempt at actually capturing that combination of Jay-Z meets The Kinks mix that it was going for. It’s all going for this open sound, but it just sounds cramped together and way too echoey to really stand out. Plus, homie, why the vocals so low on this song in particular?

The best way I can put it is this; look at a black and white film like Sin City, The Lighthouse or The Big Combo, and look at how beautiful those colors land on screen. Now, look at Doug Walker shoot something in black and white for one of his skits. Yes, technically speaking they are doing the same thing, but one clearly feels more like there’s a level of skill being presented, whereas the other feels a little…slapped together. That’s what the ‘loud’ moments of AM feel to me, looking back. “There are effects on everything, that means there’s effort!”. No. There’s actually loud and then there’s the compressed dynamic bomb going on in this mix.

In a attempt to figure out more of this open mix, I went through and listened to live versions of these songs through the live record ‘Live At The Royal Albert Hall’, where the mix of the live band, the thing they are clearly chasing on this album, are able to exist, and while it didn’t really encase songs like ‘Do I Wanna Know’, ‘R U Mine?’ makes a whole lot more sense mix wise. It’s got that loud, noisy drive to it that was clearly missing from the studio version. The fuzz of the guitars and the drums aren’t in a losing battle but rather combining to create a big ball of energy, the dynamic solo section popping out with these rougher moments of feedback making feel very energetic and exciting that the studio version just doesn’t have.

But hey, that’s the loud songs. What about the ballads?

And I will admit; this mix works MUUUUUCH better with it’s slow songs then it does with its big songs. Songs like ‘Mad Sounds’, ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ and ‘No. 1 Party Anthem’. Because the songs themselves are able to work with the more open and dynamic sounds, they actually have a lot going for them. Again, the drums are stuck in this terrifying compressed echoey “LOUD IS GOOD” hellhole, but everything else sounds really nice in this mix.

‘No. 1 Party Anthem’ in particular has this very fluid piano, mixing well with the bass and guitar, this nice little organ coming in every so often to add a little more density to what’s being presented, even sliding in this really nice reverbed guitar, subtly adding to the song rather then taking away. That comparison to ‘Jigsaw’ by Radiohead? It’s nowhere as good. It is ruined slightly by those goddamn drums, but it’s getting closer to that core idea. Hell, I actually really like the guitar coming in around the bridge, mixing with these plucky, echoed guitars, making for this more glittery and pretty sound that builds-up quite nicely with Alex’s vocals, leading to a truly euphoric guitar lead in the final chorus. Honestly, this song was the big song that I felt this idea for this record really and truly worked for me, and as i’ll explain later on, probably my favorite on the album.

The other song I thought had a fantastic mix is ‘I Wanna Be Yours’, the only song here that I’d say has a FANTASTIC mix. First off, it’s the only drums on the ENTIRE ALBUM that I really love (probably because it sounded like it came from an actual drum machine for the most part), with these hard hitting yet not glaringly obviously loud kicks and snares mixing in which, shockingly, sounding great. Second off, the rest of the instrumentation just grows so fluidy, rising with every piece of instrumentation, in a way that reminded me of more futuristic ‘Fantastic Voyage’ by David Bowie.Twin Peaky-sy reverbed guitars, bass that sounds like it could be 808s in a fresh and fun way, vocals that stand present in the mix, but once that chorus hits of the organ and backup vocals, it sounds euphoric. Alex slinks into this song so smoothly, which is a tactic he does to varied results, but in this mix it really does fucking work, and when those drums come in louder, it works so much better then almost every other song here. Honestly, with the way this song is mixed, it reminds me happily of a track off of ‘Humbug’ like Cornerstone or even one of the highlights of Suck It and See. Within the mix, the production, and the performances, this song, on a technical side, sounds great!

…So what happened to the loud songs?!

I think taking a more open direction to a record like this is a great idea, and it’s an idea that I think Arctic Monkeys have gotten better at with future records like ‘Tranquility Base’ , with this more analog, less compressed vintage 70s take, giving us in moments those euphoric mixes like in ‘Four Out Of Five’, ‘American Sports’ and ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’ by taking weird mix risks, almost Bowie-esq, dialing into the more studio oriented idea of AM and committing to it, and on the other side there’s ‘The Car’, which, in my opinion, is what AM wanted to do but successful. To misquote Futurama; “Compare Body Paint to Mad Sounds and kill…uh…your scrobbles for AM. I guess. Don’t really feel comfortable saying ‘k1ll yourself’ over an album, honestly. Really fucking extreme, actually.” These songs are more open, which in the slower parts, sound nice, and when they play into dynamics, it can quite sound nice. But ‘nice’, I don’t think is what this band is going for. They want to be big, beautiful, badass. Not ‘nice’. And so many songs go for the throat and only end up nice.

So sure, if these songs didn’t have this mix in mind, they might be a bit better…but it does open up a new problem…a problem with the songwriting.

-------------------------------------------------------------PART THREE: Stop The Song, I Wanna Get Off----------------------------------------------------------
(The Songwriting)

…yeah I’m gonna be honest, there isn’t gonna be a lot to say in this segment because this can be summerized in one quick statement: this albums songwriting can either be pretty neat to genuinely so fucking boring.

But that’s weird to say, since it was my FAVORITE album for a while. This was the first album I ever rated on AOTY, and more important than that, this was the first vinyl I ever bought with my families money from The Warehouse when they heard I wanted to get a turntable (the second one I got was Pink Floyd’s The Wall, that same day no less!) I’d spin this over and over again. When I talk to friends about this album, I have such joy in my voice, especially with people who still love it. They talk about how ‘at the time it was such a fresh change of pace in the mainstream’, and if i’m being honest, as someone who was living as a kid during that time; it was. It was nice to hear rock n’ roll music, in the most traditional sense get the same radio play on the same station as pop songs. It was crazy, crossing your fingers between ‘Fun.’ and ‘Will.I.Am’ to maybe hear ‘Do I Wanna Know’ or maybe even, if the radio station was cool enough, ‘Why’d You Only Call Me When You're High?’. I streamed this album, this band, front to back so many damn times, it is basically burnt into my DNA.

But then again, that was when kids still listened to the radio. Not to be ‘old man yells at cloud’, but streaming was just starting to become a huge thing when this album came out. The year before, I heard of an application that just became available in my country called Spotify, and changed everything. For the most part, if you didn’t care about ads or listening to a playlist from front to back, it was basically free, and you could play anything. All of a sudden, the floodgates were open. No more buying an album for one song, no more trying to hunt down music on Limewire, no more scouring C4, JuiceTV or, godforbid, if you had a friend who had Sky, AltTV to try and find good songs. Every piece of music (except Tool for some reason) you could possibly think of was there, ready to be listened to. So, of course, curiosity gets the better of you and you go down avenues that would never play on the radio: video game parodies, hardcore electronic music, goth and industrial music, classical music, experimental rock, noise music. I think curiosity with having everything, you’ll be extremely critical of what you do choose to hear.

Hell, I wouldn't even know what I’d do if I knew I could just rate and log anything I ever wanted. We are living in a world where Letterboxd is one of the biggest websites on earth, where RYM is being frequently mentioned in music discussion, Goodreads exists, AnimePlanet or websites of it’s ilk are becoming huge within those communities, Backloggd, Glitchwave and even the fucking Steam application itself is all about rating games you like and dislike. Everything is becoming micromanaged, able for the critique you give to be criticized. Layers upon layers of one idea: everything and everyone can have an opinion on anything, and that can be out there, forever. Like I said, it’s harder to change your mind or grow with an album when you’ve basically told 3000 people that you didn’t like it.

And honestly? I can see why kids who grew up on streaming right from the get-go look at this and dismiss it. It’s now in the past, this album didn’t come out in real time like it did for me. So if you were to look back on this album, yeah, it’s boring as shit compared to…basically any other alternative rock record coming out today.

See, ‘AM’, as I've said many times before, is trying to go for the cool. Not loud, not punk, not intense, just cool. As such, a lot of these cool songs, like ‘Do I Wanna Know’, ‘Arabella’, ‘One For The Road’ are slowed down compared to the bands previous material, with more emphasis on the groove rather than the blaring noise, which, on one hand, points to a band that is more willing to slow down and make more melodic music. You’d expect a song with backup vocals from Josh fucking Homme to be more blaring and dangerous sounding, but ‘One For The Road’ is more slinky, like a group of teenagers in leather jackets wondering down a street, not causing any trouble, but more wondering around. It’s not as much ‘running around with the lads and getting up the piss rope hehe’ like their debut and Favorite Worst Nightmare, but it’s also not committing to the psychedelic pop that ‘Humbug’ had. It’s taking the ideas presented in the more raw ‘Suck It And See’, and putting it in a new context, one that feels a little bit jet black.

One of this albums many ideas is to incorporate Hip Hop influence in how these songs are constructed can be seen more clearly in the b-side ‘Stop The World I Wanna Get Off With You’, where you can see the clear influence of sounds like RnB, Hip Hop and Pop clearly forcefully entering the Arctic Monkeys sound, which hey, i’m never opposed to. I think when artists take inspiration from other genres, they can make incredibly exciting stuff, like when Bowie took Kraftwerk and made Heroes, or when Radiohead got into Aphex Twin and made Kid A. It makes sense that Arctic Monkeys would take US Hip Hop like Dr. Dre or Jay Z and put their own spin on it, since that’s basically what they were doing previously, but this time it’s less British and more American. It’s less ‘Boy in da Corner’, less grime and more ‘Magna Carta Holy Grail’, more G-Funk and that East Coast sound.

Now, obviously I’m not saying that the Hip Hop influence is the only thing adding to this album. You have Alex’s continual flirtation with big ballads on tracks like ‘No. 1 Party Anthem’, the Black Sabbath influence on ‘R U Mine?’ and even an almost Beach Boys-esq piano fuckery with ‘Snap Out Of It’. Hell, just based on songwriting, ‘Snap Out Of It’ and ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ are the clear winners for me in terms of composition. It’s clear that the Monkeys were trying to be a little bit more ‘classic’ with how they wrote songs, and on those two songs, it really works! But for nearly everything else…

…is this the best we are doing fam?

Not to say these songs are awful and beyond redeeming. Not at all. Sure, a lot of the bigger songs lack a lot of complexity, but that doesn’t mean they are outwardly bad just based on that. If simple songwriting was the bane of our existence, then I could tell nearly the whole of the Punk community to go fuck themseles. It’s more that, given the context of Arctic Monkeys full career and body of work, this album very rarely lets them shift into full gear with the fear that it doesn’t sound ‘cool’.

Let's take ‘Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High’ for example. This is the biggest proponent of the Hip Hop influence taking hold, with that almost G-Funk bass going on, little guitar stabs coming in and that simple yet instantly recognizable high hat, kick and snare pattern that’s all over this track. That’s how the song starts and, if i’m being honest, doesn’t move from that spot for very long until the chorus where it just…adds a shaker and some reverb-esq synths. Which is effective, I guess? I do like how pretty the song gets at this point, but it feels like this is a song that is constantly trying to get somewhere that it can’t. I know this is what it’s trying to do, because ‘No. 1 Party Anthem’ ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ and ‘Snap Out Of It’ actually reach those spots, whereas this song is almost about to and then…ends.

…and that’s a lot of how this album feels! This mostly just feels like a sluggish, meandering mess on a bad day, and ‘slightly catchy RnB influenced rock music’ on a good day. And I won’t knock the importance of at the very least the album's aesthetic at the time, far from it. But a lot of these songs, outside of a couple of tracks, very rarely kick into high gear.

And that problem is no more apparent than on the very first song: ‘Do I Wanna Know’.

You know this song, everyone knows this song. This is the song that got me to listen to the album for god sake, but…when you really sit with this song, at least with context to what the Arctic Monkeys have done previously, it feels oddly limp and overly simplistic. Obviously it’s a big departure from what the band usually does, like put Brianstorm next to this song and you’ll see the biggest clique in critiquing this album: “but it doesn’t sound like their old stuff!!11”. But...yeah, it doesn’t even match up. These sound like two different bands, the only difference is that here? I know exactly which of the two bands I’d rather spend my time getting to know. Hell, put this song next to ‘She’s Thunderstorms’ and you can see a big problem. ‘Do I Wanna Know’ doesn’t really start, it just kinda…happens, until you reach the chorus, and then it feels like it starts. And for an opener? That’s…not great! Personally, I think that out of all the songs here, I don’t even know how you’d start this album. Maybe ‘One For The Road’? If you wanted to throw off your listener so that ‘R U Mine?’ hits harder, you could have started with ‘Mad Sounds’, but ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ as the first track?! Insanity.

That’s the biggest problem that I’ve seen with this album's songwriting: there really is nothing to say. It’s fucking boring. Hell, I'm surprised I was able to talk THIS long about the songwriting, because it’s this utterly boring void sometimes listening to this album. If you didn’t grow up on this album, then unfortunately, this will just be a soul sucking experience. Like, what is this album even saying?!

…No really, what is it saying?! (transitions are for pussies)

--------------------------------------------------------------PART FOUR: The Love Ballad Shalalala ----------------------------------------------------------
The Lyrics

A lot of times, when I write reviews, I have this looming question: what the hell am I doing this for? I mean, I know why I like doing this; exploring music critically makes you interested in what you like and don’t like. If not for this process, something like ‘Rollercoaster’ or even these films I’m trying to get made now (Bad Habits coming soon to a film festival near you hopefully!) would have NEVER happened. Not in a million years. And that’s not me boosting my ego, that’s just the plain truth. But as prose, as a written form, which sometimes I play around with and create stories with (for better…and for worse. Seriously, I have no idea why I wrote so many of those), sometimes I wonder; what the hell is this saying?

As of recently I’d like to think that these reviews are getting better at subtext while still, you know, being reviews. But it’s hard for me NOT to include stories, or heighten certain emotions in these things, because I just wanna tell stories. Stories of artists, stories of albums, stories of songs in certain moments in life, stories of characters in albums or in songs talking to each other, stories of jokes. I love, love, LOVE stories, and that’s a big reason why I love music; most of the time, if not all the time, songs are a series of stories strung together. Sometimes it’s lots of little stories created to make a huge story. Sometimes, people tell stories you don’t wanna hear (Cokie The Clown COUGH COUGH), but does it make those stories any less interesting? For better or for worse, no. It just means the person has to refine that story.

So when I complain, I don’t do it because I want someone to stop telling those audio stories (...OK, most of the time), I just want them to refine that story. I know when I put stuff out that I have a story in mind, but telling it is tricky business. Even if you are able to pick apart why a story does or doesn’t work for you, making a story is a whole other ball park. So that leaves me with a big question: what the hell am I doing this for? That’s a big reason why I just kinda stopped reviewing for a while: it was a looming sense of silliness with the whole situation.

And yes, it is silly to talk about a reviewing website like this. I understand and am very much aware that putting this much thought into a website that you put a funny little number next to a funny little album or movie is silly, but for me, art has a very real power over me. It can help save lives, I know for a fact it’s saved mine. Hearing ‘Hoodoo’, ‘Hurt’, ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, ‘You Get What You Give’, ‘The Show Must Go On’, ‘Heroes’, ‘Dawn Chorus’, ‘Mother I Sober’, ‘Samaritans’, ‘New York I Love You’, No Reptiles’,’The Death of Music’, ‘Haze of Interference’, etc, have all been emotionally powerful moments for me, to the point where it’s easy for me to place importance on these songs as things that saved me. But they didn’t. I saved myself, and it was my choice to press play on those songs. They didn’t call to me, I made the choice to press play. I made the choice to write this review. These choices that I make, that we as a whole make, that is what gets me emotional. It’s the overthinking of it all that makes it so difficult.

So sometimes, just sometimes, a simple song can mean so much to you. And other times…it can be ‘I Want It All’.

The thing I’ve found is that you can check for most things in different ways; if you wanna listen to how the song is written and constructed, go for the live version, if you wanna listen to the song mixed and produced, go for the go for the studio version and if you wanna hear the lyrics to a song, go for the acoustic version. With this in mind, the thing I hear when I hear acoustic versions of AM are, for lack of a better term, very classical, braggadocious love ballads. Not many real thrills or set-ups, just mostly love ballads.

It takes the band away from the more psychedelic imagery of Humbug or even elements of Suck It And See, but more into what their first record was about; being young, getting into trouble, staying up late, having filthy sex, going home and wondering what was going on the night before. That’s not even me looking into it; Alex literally says that in the first song ‘Do I Wanna Know?’, a song about the constant wondering of if the person who have feelings for feels the same way, addicted to this feeling like a drug, as quoted in the pre-chorus:

‘Baby, we both know that the nights were mainly made for sayin' things that you can't say tomorrow day’

But now, Alex is 27. Which, for the most part, isn’t fucking old. At all, actually. It’s that same deviousness, just now it’s mostly about wondering if you should settle down, find somewhere quiet and live off of that idea for a while. Same goes with ‘R U Mine?’, a song that really is the same thematically as ‘Do I Wanna Know’, but with a more Lil Wayne inspired hip hop flow vocally, with lines that feel like punchlines in a way, like the line:

“I'm a puppet on a string; Tracy Island.
Time-traveling, diamond cutter-shaped heartaches.”

It’s basically a full on stand-up special from Alex about how much he wants to fuck. And that idea is all over this album; a push and pull between the rowdy and reality. It’s both sad and kinda funny, but in a way that makes you think of some drunk dude at a bar wandering around trying to get a lady to come home with him. Again, it’s VERY classic love ballad stuff here…

…and that’s really it for most of these songs.

Ok, well, if I'm going to be generous, one can say that this is a concept album of falling head over heels for someone and just needing to be theirs, but even then that’s a bit of a stretch. The obsession and addiction of love is a theme through this album, for sure, and certain ideas get brought up again and again; phones, alcohol, coke, name dropping old art, being controlled by love, the want or need to be for someone rather than yourself (brought to a very literal head to an almost defeatist degree on ‘I Wanna Be Yours’, penned by famed satirist and OG scatman John Cooper Clarke, with Alex Turner comparing himself to boring house objects in the hopes to be in this other person's life) but…yeah it doesn’t really amount to any real grand story or concept. This album is what it is; a bunch of painfully honest love songs; all Alex wants or needs in life is this one person, apparently.

And by god I hope he got her, because I wanna hear about anything else.

Look, it’s not that the lyrics here are bad, it’s just the same kind of story over and over again. If I, again, am being generous, I can see how this could be a play on what a crush feels like; all you can think about is them, and how amazing they are, and how better your life would be if they were there right now. But it just feels like such a stretch when there isn’t really any trajectory to go to. You technically could start the album off more genuine, then become more obsessive and grimey with your want for them, until you end up at ‘I Wanna Be Yours’, where our protagonist comes to the conclusion that that’s all they want. They don’t “want it all”, they want to be YOURS, and that is ALL. But the album doesn’t. It starts with ‘Do I Wanna Know’, a song about the crippling danger of having this crush, almost to a degree where it feels like a drug.

So, if the album doesn’t have a concept, then how are the songs themselves?

Yeah, again there isn’t much to say here, they are just love songs. Well written, in a lot of ways, but it is what it is. All the songs are either Alex Turner writing about how bad he wants to bone like on the literal Women Description Song ‘Arabella’ and ‘Knee Socks’, the almost mournful idea of seeing someone you like hit an addiction on tracks like the third person rattling of being in love and trying to stop it to make them love YOU ‘Snap Out Of It’ and the first person ‘hehe drug is fun’ ‘Why’d You Only Call Me When Your HIgh?” going into youthful habits on tracks like ‘No. 1 Party Anthem’, a song more trying to make fun of songs made for fun vibey parties, with this track actually saying what it is like to be at a party, and ‘One for the Road’, a song about leaving your partner with one last drink as you head off to the road. Honestly, One For The Road has some of my favorite imagery on the album, with the pre-chorus saying:

“So we all go back to yours and you sit and talk to me on the floor.
There's no need to show me 'round, baby I feel like I've been here before.
I've been wonderin' whether later when you tell everybody to go,
Will you pour me one for the road?”

Of course, there are other songs on here that have…ideas, I guess. ‘Mad Sounds’ is about hearing a song and it makes you feel good. OK. ‘Fireside’ feels almost like a depressive sequel to ‘505’, with this person remembering that their lover has now officially left the hotel rooms he was going back to, like it was all just a fantasy, with lines like:

“I can't explain but I wanna try.
There's this image of you and I,
and it goes dancing by in the morning and in the night time.
There's all these secrets that I can't keep,
like in my heart there's that hotel suite and you lived there so long,
It's kind of strange now you're gone”

…and that’s mostly the album. Lyrically, and I cannot stress this enough, it is as simple as you think it is. It’s just love songs. That’s it. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with that. Doing jsut love songs is what fuckin’ everyone did in the 50s. But this is 2010, and while clearly commercially going back to that time period was what people wanted to hear back then, but with AM now? It just becomes something that doesn’t have as much staying power as the youthful exploration of the club scene from ‘Whatever You Say I Am’, the teenaged insanity of ‘Favorite Worst Nightmare’, the psychedelic and heady ‘Humbug’. Sure, it’s a little less quirky up white boy-core as ‘Suck It And See’, but it does feel like a real step back writing wise. It’s just a lot of Alex Turner's songs trying to find the best way to say “I fancy you :3”, which just feels a bit like an Easter Egg; it’s nice at first, but then it just gets very hallow.. ‘ And yes, this is a problem that they would sort out; Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’ is fucking night and day compared to this album! But while this album is the way it is, it feels like a point of stagnation for the band. Almost on purpose.

But…is that a bad thing?

Well yes but I need a fuckING TRANSITIO-

-------------------------------------------------------------------OUTRO: What If You Were Right The First Time?---------------------------------------------
Pipe Has Another Classic Existential Crisis over AM

When I started this review, I wanted to try and really defend this album. I wanted to prove that my nostalgia, while mild for this album, was legitimate, and that people were just being too mean. Blame the way people look at music, blame streaming, blame music expanding, but don’t blame the Monkeys. But now I sit and look at this album for what it is and, as I’ve aged, as this band has aged, as music has aged, I have to snap out of it: this album might be the worst Arctic Monkeys album in terms of quality. Even Suck It And See keeps things somewhat interesting by at least mixing the sound up. At least that album had ‘That’s Where You’re Wrong’, ‘Library Pictures’ or ‘Don’t Sit Down Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair’.

But I feel weird saying that. This used to be my favorite album. Very dominantly too, I can basically sing to you or play you these songs on bass and vocals from memory if I wanted to. It’s how I got INTO music. So what does that say about me? What does that say about us? As music critics? What are we trying to get out of AM, out of albums? Do we want music that is simply tailored to our taste? Because if so, i’ll just put on an Industrial Dance Punk record and I’ll be happy. But does that mean, because this is just a simple love album with kind of wonky mixing and above average songwriting, that this album is bad?

Nah. It’s just mid.

I relistened to this album a couple of times reviewing this thing. I kept wondering why, as a kid, I put so much importance onto this album. Why, as practically an adult, do I put so much time, effort and energy listening and rating these albums? Why is that important to me? I think my answer is that music comes along in weird times for us. Sometimes, we like something because “well, that’s never been on the radio before!”, or “well, I’ve never heard a song written about this before!” or “gee, these sonics put together i’ve never heard before!”. It’s, a lot of the time, about timing for that person. And to boil it down to just a score and nothing else? That’s missing what I love about music. The personal experience.

AM, to me, at this point of my life, is a bit mid. That’s not a hot take. When I was a kid, this was my favorite jam. That’s not a hot take either. For me, I just like talking about music. And that’s the coldest take I have. It’s as simple as AM; I just am in love with it. And I want to keep talking about it, even if it’s infrequent. And again, I thank everyone who wants to hear me talk about it. Keep writing about music, or movies, or things you love. It’s more powerful than you think.

Who knows, maybe you’ll write the most boring love song too then cum money HAYOOOOO PIPE REVIEW ENDS WITH TALKING BOUT CUM LETS MAKE IT TO 5000 BABYYYYYYYYYYY

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Favorite Jams: I Wanna Be Yours, No. 1 Party Anthem, Snap Out Of It

Lest (and yes, I’m still gonna write it as lest for another 3000 followers you bitches) Favorite: Mad Sounds

Review Title: AM: How I Learned To Stop Hating AOTY And Love The Mid