The third installment of Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys, Humbug, is yet another roguish album complete with undertones of munificent vulgarity served up as a testament that these rockers bleed ‘chav’ through and through. There’s no lack of solid jams and skittering lyricism even though Alex Turner, known for his caustic pipes, croons a softer mature song. Influenced by the legendary works of Cream and Jimi Hendrix and smartly produced by Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) and James Ford, the album features an amplified instrument vocabulary; from the clapping of castanets to the backdrops of minster-like organ arpeggios. The young Brits have justly evolved in good kilter without being sell-outs. All ten tracks are tied together by an eerie cynicism whether it’s Dance Little Liar, Secret Door or the first released single of the album Crying Lightning, but equally lurking in the corners, the underdog weighing in at least ten-minutes-and-thirty-two-seconds strong, is ‘fixating monogamous romance’. In Dangerous Animals, promoted to our knees, we hunt with Turner in pursuit of the crushing harpy. We sway to the small-town psychedelic 60s in Cornerstone while he feigns, “I asked her if I could call her your name.” And she’s anywhere and everywhere, hiding in his soup and revealing her face in books, in Fire and Thud. But just when we start to think that they’ve lost their snarl, they hit us up with classic Arctic Monkeys colloquialism: “I’d like to poke them in their prying eyes with things they’d never see, If it smacks them in their temples.” Bottom line: their melodic bite is again as big as their bark.
Key Tracks: Cornerstone, My Propeller, Crying Lightning, Dangerous Animals
Moods: Energetic, Brash, Playful, Lively, Stylish, Visceral
Buy: Humbug
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