Arctic Monkeys - Suck It And See

Poor Alex Turner. It’s not often the curse of the difficult second album strikes so poetically. When he shuffled on to the scene in 2005, ever the unassuming frontman, Whatever You Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, his aching love letter to the practised art of going out and getting pissed, struck a chord with a generation of teenagers who did little else. The lyrics were disarmingly poetic, and above all else, the album sounded great. It came at a time when people needed their anthems, and an unsuspecting club-going public found them in Alex Turner, their unlikely spokesperson. Unsurprisingly, a headline set at the Reading and Leeds festivals followed, along with a world tour and an entire generation who know the album back to front.

It was then that the curse hit. When you’ve made an album that expresses everything you’ve learnt up to that point, what, then, do you have left to write about? 2007’s Favourite Worst Nightmare came and went, with a couple of expectedly great melodies, and flashes of lyrical brilliance, but little in the way of innovation. Similarly, with a new record collection (Hendrix, Sabbath etc.) and production credits from Josh Homme, Humbugpromised to showcase a brand new, badass incarnation of the Arctic Monkeys, which turned out to be surprisingly convincing. Their guitars sounded thick and impending, and a world-weary Alex Turner was more in his element as a Nick Cave-style balladeer.

Now, a full six years after their debut, Arctic Monkeys’ third shot at relevance is still just wide of the mark. That said, they do sound far more confident in their sound, and the newer influences finally sit comfortably with Turner’s morbid crooning. Matt Helder’s drums are as brutal and fresh sounding as ever, understatedly thrashing through each bouncing melody. At first listen, the tracks hold up. There are enough riffs and hooks to keep you interested, and each line is sung with an underlying melancholy that hints at something much darker underneath the surface.

Problem is though, there’s not.

Lead single ‘Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair’ starts off with a promisingly seedy guitar line and grows into a thundering foot-stomper (special mention again to Matt Helders’ drumkit shitstorm), but save for an oo-oo-oo-yeah-yeah-yeah chorus, even by the end of its three-minute duration it seems tired and unimaginative. There’s plenty of workable stuff here, but every spark of ingenuity is stretched out and exploited, a far cry from the frequent splashes of colour jumping out of the first record.

While the performances are musically spot-on (Matt Helders isthe man), the lyrics and songcraft seem forced and lazy, which regrettably exposes a band firmly resting on their laurels. The greatest shame of all, perhaps, is that the album isn’t bad. Once it gets going, the vision’s there. All My Own Stunts is firmly up there with their best songs, and opener She’s Thunderstorms is a charming jangly anthem, both showing just what this album could have been. They’ve a solid new direction and as a band have an incredible potential to create another classic album, but for whatever reason, it’s yet to arrive.

At the start of the video to 2005’s I Bet That You Look Good On The Dancefloor, a fresh-faced Alex Turner gave us a warning through his awkward teenage diffidence: ‘don’t believe the hype’. Maybe we should have believed him.

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