Mojo - The Music Magazine

Arctic Monkeys

Humbug
DOMINO

ARCTIC MONKEYS' ALEX TURNER faces a dilemma that will be familiar to the so-called spokespersons of previous generations: how to live up to an accolade you never wanted or asked for? While songs such as A Certain Romance and Teddy Picker poetically bullseyed Britain's malaise and Turner's demeanour - Lennonish disdain for the thickies wrapped in preternatural insouciance - is that of the lofty hipster-savant, cultural leadership, especially of the more parochial sort, is a poisoned chalice and he knows it.

Without compromising Turner's key strengths (tart verbal wit laced with surrealism) or his band's (notably, their harsh, almost mechanoid attack) Humbug is a voyage somewhere new, further away than ever from the Steeltown pub verité of Riot Van. Turner's recent assimilation of dramatic '60s pop structures, and the familiar stygian threat of producer Josh Homme - behind seven tracks out of 10 - have combined in a richer, more powerful sound, while Turner seems more and more preoccupied with the weird ways of human desire.

...To the extent that darkly grooving opener, My Propeller, is just one big double-entendre ("I can't get it started on my own" is almost Frankie Howerd), while the brilliant Cornerstone (one of three James Ford productions) regards the narrator's desire to find a girl that's just like the last one, and will tolerate being called the same name. First single Crying Lightning is hilarious nonsense charged with rumpo subtext and Dangerous Animals - the most Josh Homme-y track with its axe-growl, sonar boinks and a snatch of Homme backing vox - features the astounding line, "Let's make a mess, lioness". Whoah, Alex! Easy, tiger!

But beyond the dirty talk, this is a beautifully balanced record: heavy yet melodic, mixing offhand self-analyis (is Turner acknowledging "a reputation as a miserable little tyke"?) with verbal assaults on the new shitterati ("which came first: the chicken or the dickhead?"). Turner's charismatic vocal style, its explosive consonants dressed with that sweetening flutter of vibrato, remains centre stage and, to the band's credit, this is by no means the Monkeys-go-Sabbath monolith previously threatened - their latest "rock" hair notwithstanding.

At 39.08, Humbug is short and sweet (and sour), and beds in nicely over repeated listens. The velvety sound, plus the paucity of Anglocentric references and colloquial Yorkshirese, make it an appropriate spearhead as the Arctic Monkeys seek to add progress abroad to domination at home.

And yet they remain, to their credit, that most British of institutions: the heavy pop group - heirs to The Beatles and The Smiths, The Jam and The (pre-Tommy) Who, but a much trickier proposition to sustain than all-out, steak-and-spuds rock. Requiring irony and guile as well as riffs and tunes, the heavy pop group walk a tightrope above the dominant culture, prompting and goading, but always in view, not retiring to that convenient bunker they call the underground.

"When the acrobat fell off the beam," sings Turner in Dangerous Animals, "she broke everyone's heart." It's not a mistake his band show any sign of making themselves.

Danny Eccleston