British indie super-group The Last Shadow Puppets; well
two-thirds super, Alex Turner has been the voice of a generation in the U.K.
and James Ford has been partly responsible for some of the tent pole records
coming out of the U.K. indie scene in the last 10 years, Miles Kane is just
Turner’s mate to be honest; returned in early 2016 with the new music and a
whole new attitude. Lead single and first track in almost 8 years ‘Bad Habits’
was a rollicking track full of horror movie soundtrack sounding strings and a
newly found aggressive nature teased a new direction for the band. Ostensibly
the track is a huge Queens of the Stone Age rip-off which is unsurprising
considering Turner’s affection for QOTSA leader Josh Homme and the fact that
the TLSP co-frontmen both reside in the Golden State. This Californian
influence is all over the record. You begin to discover as the record unfurls
that this record is a collection of very similar tracks about lusting after
women in the City of Angels set to a seductive, string heavy soundtrack and
that ‘Bad Habits’ was a tease if something that didn’t come as TLSP fall back
into a comfortable formula for the majority of the record.
In the years between TLSP’s two records Alex Turner has had
quite the career. He’s released 3 more records with his other band Arctic
Monkeys which resulted in them headlining the biggest festival in the world,
Glastonbury. With this in mind it’s clear to see why Turner has a new found
swagger, he demonstrated it on Arctic Monkey’s brilliant ‘AM’ and it carries
over onto this record. On basically every song he croons about his sexual and
emotional escapades with women which seem to have sky-rocketed in quantity
since the last record, who knew that being one of the biggest rock stars in the
world would result in women throwing themselves at you, eh? The odd part about
this though is that Kane often joins in on tracks and the lads sing the tracks
together, are they sharing all these experiences together? It just seems a bit
off. It all gets a bit self-indulgent on ‘Sweet Dreams, TN’ where Turner
essentially pens a love letter to his girlfriend accompanied with overblown
instrumentation trying to make the track bigger than the lyrics dictate it
should be. When every track on the record is about women I can see why the band
want to make this track distinct and special for Turner but it doesn’t come
off.
That is a recurring problem throughout the record. When
every track is more or less about the same thing, the band struggle at times to
break up the monotony. They succeed on occasion, ‘Miracle Aligner’ is doubtlessly
the high point of the record featuring a beautiful, catchy chorus and superb
string instrumentation resulting in baroque bliss. But then tracks like ‘Dracula
Teeth’ and ‘She Does the Woods’ are distinctly worse tracks than the rest of
the record. The former sounds like an unused outtake from ‘AM’ whilst the
latter sounds like an average Queens of the Stone Age cover band. The verbose lyrical
genius that Turner and Kane are renowned for is on display throughout this
record though and it certainly elevates the tracks, a particular highlight
being on ‘Pattern’ where Kane croons “I slip and I slide like a spider on an
icicle”. When you’re that smooth with your writing, a lot of other aspects of
the songs can be forgiven. One year on the record is still enjoyable, it’s a
great late night easy listen with some ups and downs. Some of the tracks didn’t
need to be there but when you have fantastic tracks like ‘Miracle Aligner’,
it’s not as bad sitting through the worse tracks. It was a long time coming
this record and it didn’t disappoint but I can’t shake the feeling that it
could have been so much more with some refinement and more exploration
thematically from the co-frontmen.