With the success of Alex Turner’s Arctic Monkeys in full swing in 2008, it came as a surprise when he announced the release of The Age of Understatement with new bandmates James Ford and Miles Kane of The Rascals.
A sonic love letter to Baroque Pop, Scott Walker and early Bowie the group, calling themselves The Last Shadow Puppets, their initial release debuted at number one on the UK album charts. Immediately interested in cutting a second album, both artists were forced to put Shadow Puppets on hold while their other projects consumed their attention.
While neither of them intended to put the band on the back burner, both Turner and Kane agree that the group’s new release Everything You’ve Come To Expect was the product of the most time they’ve had to devote to the project since 2008.
Now with time and creativity to spare The Last Shadow Puppets again commit themselves to vinyl, bringing with them a cinematic flair, increasingly rich soundscapes and a fresh new bassist in Zach Dawes.
With so much time between releases the trio can’t help being affected by their years. In a recent radio interview Turner and Kane joked about how high their voices were on the previous record, as well as how much faster they played, noting now that their performances and the orchestral accompaniment lacked subtlety.
[include_post id=”468683″]The maturation of their songwriting has brought with it an obvious willingness to experiment with style, genre and production techniques. While it’s clear that Everything You’ve Come To Expect is in many ways stylistic scattershot it still retains the hallmarks of the band’s unique style, especially influenced by Turner’s recent songwriting with the Arctic Monkeys.
One of Turner’s recent fascinations is a shift to lyrical weirdness, focusing more on the feeling the words give to a listener than crafting a song about something specific. As a result, the band’s sound falls further into the realms of the abstract, held together only by the groups penchant for pop rhythms and song structure.
It’s hard to talk about any Puppets album without mentioning the stringed instrumentation. Everything sets a golden standard for the bands use of orchestral composition. Thanks to a genius arrangement by Owen Pallett the album is cinematic in scale, comfortably placed on a pedestal with on-screen greats like Morricone and director, Jim Jarmusch.
Of the eleven tracks on this sonic journey, few bare the need of special mention. Opening with dramatic flair and up beat energy, lead track ‘Aviation’ sets the tone for the album, with verbose strings hinting ominously at the intricately crafted soundscapes to come.
‘The Element of Surprise’ perfectly showcases Pallett’s beautiful grasp on instrumentation, especially when combined with Turner’s lyricisms. The result is a track that is at once casual neo-disco and a perfect tribute to the very music that spawned disco in the first place.
As one of the album’s lead singles, simplistic punk jam ‘Bad Habits’ has one thing going for it that none of the other tracks quite grasp – sultry intrigue. Like indulging a fetish behind closed doors, ‘Bad Habits’ brings with it a certain guilty pleasure, hammering on to an equally pleasant dramatic conclusion.
Conversely, ‘Used To Be My Girl’ showcases the power of Turner’s new abstract style of songwriting. One of the album’s richest soundscapes matches perfectly with his twilight lyricisms, painting a sonic picture of smoke on the breeze with slinking reverbs that ring for days and a hypnotic use of percussion.
Every track has its own unique vibe but follows rather conventional pop structure, building throughout the track until the final crescendo. It’s here where almost all of them fall into the same trap of cliché. Brit pop guitars and crooning vocals crash over cinematic strings reminiscent of a James Bond title sequence.
Despite this dip into cliché, what could have been just another guitar pop album paying tribute to the golden era of ’60s baroque is instead much more. Even with a few small pitfalls, it remains a beautiful piece of neo-baroque songwriting, lovingly carved from the musical growth of the group’s last eight years.
