Like the grand movie twist, the camera pulls back on 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino to reveal that it was never on the moon at all. It was a lunar-themed complex in the heart of old Vegas. Arctic Monkeys’ curveball sixth album, all cosmic cocktail lounge vibes and plush retro-futurist visions, wasn’t the one-off it sounded, the stepping-off point for a voyage into a great sonic unknown. Instead, it was the sound of the Monkeys docking at their intended destination, having raced from the sordid streets of Sheffield – via Turner’s similarly Sixties-obsessed side project The Last Shadow Puppets – to the Bellagio whiskey bar residency in just 16 years.
The Car, their seventh record, could be subtitled Weird But Soothing in Las Vegas. For much of the album, singer Alex Turner sounds as though he’s fronting a workaday lounge band in the Golden Nugget, reeling off interchangeable soul, funk and bossa nova tributes to Matt Monroe, Marvin Gaye and Dionne Warwick for a distracted crowd. Bacharach strings descend at times, making “There’d Better be a Mirrorball” and the gentle flamenco drama of the title track sound like the sort of John Barry refrain you’d hear as 007 arrives at a tropical locale… before anything exciting happens.
It’s Turner’s persona that gives The Car its charm and intrigue, though. Where Tranquility Base… provided his obtuse lyricism with a sci-fi framework, here it roars off in every direction, as wonderfully imagistic as it is largely impenetrable. Lines such as “freaky keyboard by the retina scan” (from “I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am”) or “I’ve snorkelled on the beaches furiously, why not rewind to Rawborough Snooker Club?” (on “Hello You”) will tie lyric interpretation sites in knots for years to come. But it’s best to simply let Turner’s wordplay wash through you, relishing the bumps and swerves. Take “Sculptures of Anything Goes”: one minute Turner is “performing in Spanish on Italian TV sometime in the future”, the next he’s floating around art galleries en route to “village coffee mornings with not long since retired spies”. Just go with him.
Likewise the songcraft. Always prone to dropping self-aware lines into recent songs, Turner’s key line here is “I just can’t for the life of me remember how they go” from “Big Ideas”. “I’m comfortable with the idea that things don’t have to be a pop song,” he recently told The Guardian, but you’d be hard-pressed to define many tracks here as songs at all. They’re something more fluid than that – moments of melody that drift in and out of soft focus with no particular direction or end point in sight; the aural equivalent of watching blossoms floating along a stream. Designed to reward deep listening, they mark, arguably, the start of a post-song era, where form and structure give way to mood and imagery.
As meandering as first single “Body Paint” seemed, it’s actually one of the most direct tracks here, curling its way from a riff echoing 2009’s “Cornerstone” through a variety of Lennon-like motifs to a charged rock climax akin to The Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”. Other numbers – the limpid “Jet Skis on the Moat” and “Big Ideas”; the squelchy funk “Hello You” and the arpeggiated bossa nova “Mr Schwartz” – seem to stumble inadvertently across their choruses second time round, having forgotten where, among the sprawling tangle of verse, they left them.
Stylistically, only “Sculptures of Anything Goes” ventures far from the Vegas strip, its crepuscular, gothic synths emulating nothing more than the Stranger Things theme music. It’s at least a sign that Arctic Monkeys still have ambitions beyond classic soul and retro revisionism. For now, though, The Car is pleasantly idling.
