Mojo - The Music Magazine

MOJO's exclusive guide to the Sheffield quartet's third offering!

1. My Propeller

If it were a colour it would be purple, with the expected heaviness of a Josh Homme production mixing with the portentous, velvety flourish of the Walkeresque pop imbibed by Alex Turner in his Last Shadow Puppets guise. A bit like one of Morrissey's doomy openers, with Turner doing a fair impression of El Mooberino's dramatic baritone. Even more Moz-esque is the extended (arf!) double-entendre of the title. "I can't get it started on my own," indeed!

2. Crying Lightning

Another bout of weird sexual game-playing, unless it's just dirty old MOJO getting the wrong end of the stick. "Your pastimes consisted of the strange, the twisted and deranged / And I loved that little game you had called 'Crying Lightning'." "And what could that be?' we ask, half afraid of the answer. Vampiric guitars, great chorus melody, and some almost Dylanesque wordplay carry the day: "With folded arms you occupied the bench like toothache."

3. Dangerous Animals

"I'm pinned down by the dark," sings hired help Josh Homme in that familiar drug-hazed croon, before the Arctic Monkeys are unleashed on a kind of digi-Sabbath riff, garnished with sonar boinks and the rattle of castanets. We'll forgive the fact that Alex repeatedly spells out the word dangerous as "D-A-N-G-R-O-U-S" since he REALLY DOES sing "let's make a mess, lioness". Has he been at the Viagra again, Alexa?

4. Secret Door

One of those swoon-inducing Turner choruses, aching with honey-dripping ooh-oohs, but there's an acid tang to this one as the VIP/sleb ecosystem that teems behind said aperture is resolutely speared: "Fools on parade cavort and carry on for waiting eyes." Turner's still playing the provincial touchstone rather well, hilariously alarmed by the attention-seeking goings-on in that London. Companion volume: Dylan Thomas's Adventures In The Skin Trade.

5. Potion Approaching

Brilliant stew of aggression, surrealism and sexual undertow, with a crunching see-saw plod-riff and what sounds like a bunch of Turner drug-code, but probably isn't. "I was biting the time zone / And we embellished the banks of our bloodstreams / and threw caution to the colourful / Then we fell asleep in the car." Last line is Turner's most playful non-sequitur: "Would you like me to build you a go-kart?" What can he possibly mean?

6. Fire And The Thud

Homme's habitually torpid drug-limbo finds its most direct translation on Humbug, with another hint of sleb-anxiety in that closing tirade: "I'd like to poke them in their prying eyes with things / They'd never see if it smacked them in their temples".

7. Cornerstone

A cracker, this, as a picaresque tale unfolds. Turner's lost in love, and stalks the pubs, obsessed, his character a beautifully tragic-comic distillation of charmingly lovelorn ("I elongated my lift home / I let him go the long way round / I smelt your scent on the seat belt and kept my short cuts to myself") and disturbingly predacious ("my chances turned to toast when I asked her if I could call her your name") and it's too good a story to spoil the ending. Meanwhile, everything Turner's learned about classic songcraft pours into a masterpiece of verse-verse-chorus-verse-middle-eight-chorus-guitar-solo-verse-whatnot, as echoes of The Smiths' appropriation of His Latest Flame resound in a knock-kneed bassline. Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford, a veteran of Favourite Worst Nightmare and The Last Shadow Puppets' The Age Of The Understatement, was "at the controls" for this one.

8. Dance Little Liar

Another lowering, glowering threat-dirge, one of those songs where Turner keeps the chorus back and feeds, instead, a tension-building fire - over which he spit-roasts some mendacious little slimeball. Then! Explosion! The band go barmy and Matt Helders' Bofors gun drum assault says, "Just you wait till they switch on the strobe lights at Reading & Leeds!"

9. Pretty Visitors

Scary Reg Dixon cinema organ summons the band's most tempestuous moment on Humbug. This time Helders is going bananas almost constantly, with leaden-jackboot deathmarch giving way to devastating tom-tom assaults, while Turner loses himself in a De Chirico nightmare and uses the words "muck" and "gasp" in ways that underline his genius. Again you can't help feeling that sudden fame is beginning (if it hadn't before) to give him the willies, when he sings, "All the pretty visitors came and waved their arms and cast the shadow of a snake pit on the wall."

10. The Jeweller's Hands

Halfway between Sicilian gangster ballad and a modern R&B lope, with Turner delivering a quasi-rapped vocal. Again the vibe is bad fever dream, haunted by wolves and drowned pioneers and laughter's assassin, but this time defeating any obvious interpretations. A downbeat close to a saturnine album, full of moody thrills and soul-threat. Where does Turner go from here? Not down, that's for sure. There's no more "down" out there.

Danny Eccleston

Humbug is released in the UK on August 24

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