Books & Poetry

Whether it’s because of their frontman’s pomposity-puncturing intellect, discourteous way with an acceptance speech, or striking resemblance to a pimply young Gelfling, it’s always been possible to find yourself rooting for Arctic Monkeys without actually liking them very much. Even when their forensic documentation of the Sheffield meat market led Nuts to award their debut album five stars out of five, we wished them well. Even when each subsequent song stole a little bit more from their chart-topping debut single ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ (except last year’s ‘Brianstorm’, which didn’t actually have a tune at all), Alex Turner’s personality won through.

If Turner had done a Raconteurs and quietly released ‘The Age…’ with zero pre-publicity, it might have been possible to feel more curiosity about this side-project with Miles Kane of raggedy Liverpudlians The Rascals, grounded in a mutual love of dramatic ’60s pop and bolstered by the string-laden orchestrations of Owen Pallett.
Apart from the Richard Hawley-ish ‘Meeting Place’, all the songs are taken at a galloping pace and consequently sound like a spaghetti western scored by Scott Walker. There’s certainly an interesting comparison to be drawn between Walker’s oppressively elusive heroines and the ‘twenty little tragedies’ that roll out across this album following the seduction Turner warns against in ‘The Age Of The Understatement’.  

But there’s none of Walker’s swirling, love-wracked nausea, just the youthful exhilaration of two 22-year-old lads at liberty to lark about with their influences. And with Turner sticking to those distinctive lyrical cadences and Kane doing his best to mimic them, this inevitably winds up sounding like the Arctic Monkeys with strings. There’re plenty of people, of course, who won’t mind that one bit.