I haven’t bought the new Arctic Monkeys album, The Car, just yet but I’m going to. To my elderly and admittedly failing ears, they’re the most important British band since The Clash. Yes, that good. But not everyone is entirely thrilled with the new record, not least because it’s very different to their early work. Gone is the brilliant, often frenetic, rock sound and in its place a crooning Alex Turner sings exquisitely over an orchestra. I see it as a logical progression from 2018’s utterly magnificent Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. It’s different, but it’s sensationally good. There are plenty of doubters, though. I think I know why.
When we hear an album we like, it’s only human to want the next album to sound if not the same, then similar. For the sake of argument – and I suspect this may cause some arguments – I’ll cite as an example the 90s popular beat combo outfit Oasis. If Noel Gallagher was, and remains, one of the worst lyricists in music history, at least he knows how to write a decent hook, even if it previously belonged to someone else. Their first album, Definitely Maybe, was so good, musically anyway, even I bought it. Gallagher didn’t invent stadium rock but he took it to a new level. And every album that followed was, essentially, a remake of the first album. Moreover, I felt that every subsequent record was worse than the one that came before. Eventually, the band split up, enabling Noel to form a new band called the High Flying Birds, who continue to make their same record over again, leaving brother Liam to plough a lucrative furrow by playing old Oasis music along with his own take on Oasis music. Liam, the less talented brother, attracts the biggest crowds because people like the old stuff.
Mike Love of the Beach Boys was highly critical of the genius Brian Wilson when he experimented with new music, like Smile. His view was quite simple: “Don’t fuck with the formula.” In other words, keep playing the songs about surf, girls and cars. No one wants to hear new music. And in a way, he was right. Now 81, Love still tours to packed houses with a version of the band with only one original member – him – despite the fact that the band has not made a decent album since 1971, the epic Surf’s Up, which definitely fucked with the formula and attracted this young boy to the post surf, girls and cars music more than the old music had.
None of this is to say that staying with the formula that made a band or artist famous in the first place is a bad thing. The likes of Coldplay and the Foo Fighters, and to a lesser extent the Killers, have attracted enormous followings with their brand of stadium rock. It would be a major surprise to hear any of them move in a direction like the Arctic Monkeys have gone. And why should they?
Some artists are constantly reinventing themselves. The late, great David Bowie was a prime example, evolving from The Laughing Gnome through Heroes and eventually Lazarus. The same with genre-defying Madonna. There will always be artists who like to challenge themselves and challenge their audiences. The Beatles were the greatest example of all time, but then they were the greatest and certainly most important band in history.
The Arctic Monkeys are here to stay. In Alex Turner, we have one of the greatest frontmen, singers and composers of modern times. Perhaps, the band will lose some traditional fans along the way, particularly those who would prefer it if the band kept making basically the same album over and over again, but they will surely gain others.
In any event, there’s room for everyone and everything, from the crowd-pleasing, stadium-filling bands who delight us all by playing all the old songs and newer songs which sound like the old songs, to the artists who like to challenge both themselves and the fans by branching out in different directions. I’m happy, on occasion, to enjoy both, from last Sunday’s Midlake show at the Bristol Trinity Centre where the band played numerous tracks from their latest album and back in 1997 when I saw the original full line-up of the Monkees at the Cardiff Arena where they played all the hits.
Sadly, the Arctic Monkeys are too big for me now, in the sense that I don’t do stadium gigs, so I’ll buy the album instead. New music, new life and all that, but there’s nothing wrong with the old formula if that’s what you like.
Same album over and over again.
