Arctic Monkeys - The Car (October 21,2022) Album • Page 12

Okay so I finally got around to my first listen and this honestly almost put me to sleep. The production and musicality is nice but I also wanted a lot more variety, it all started blending together for me. I loved TBHC too so it's not that I want the old sound necessarily. Definitely hope this grows on me but not a good first impression to be honest

 

this honestly feels more varied to me than TBHC lol, I've seen that complaint a few times and I really don't get it

 

my first impressions of this were not good & sleepy is a word I’d have used too.

 

It seems dynamically flat at first, but actually every song is quite different.

 

I think you have to sit and focus on each song individually multiple times to really have them stick. When it first came out, “Mirrorball” seemed mundane to me at first, but each repeat listen made me appreciate it more.

 

no way

 

i agree it’s a grower but i also found it instrumentally pretty interesting off the jump. it’s more alex’s parts that take some time to appreciate.

 

right. the instrumentals are instantly cool but modern alex isnt a very hooky singer.

 

i echo the sentiment that the first few times i listened to this i thought it was not bad per se, but not for me and boring as shit. my tune has totally changed now. I too love TBH&C and everything they've ever done.

def keep trying, giving these guys the benefit of the doubt paid off!

 

i can’t imagine ever listening to something this and has done, whether it’s the first listen or the hundredth, and thinking it’s “boring” lol

 

they're working with slower stuff now but like... even my first reactions to TBHC were that it wasn't for me but it's objectively an interesting record. I came around on it obviously. same goes for The Car, only this time I had a concrete idea of what to expect

 

I appreciate that they're moving in new directions but still don't have issues playing their older songs live. Some acts make a drastic stylistic change and then ignore their back catalogue, which can piss off a lot of casual fans.

I think they're doing this right.

 

Arctic Monkeys are definitely in their Zooropia/Pop era if you catch my drift

 

Pop fucking rules so I agree

 

Zooropa and Pop might be my two favorite U2 records. They were a different band then, literally fearless coming off of Auchtung Baby. That is a very good analogy for TBHC and The Car, maybe similar to Radiohead during Kid A/Amnesiac as well.

 

U2 got so spoiled by people embracing their late career albums that Bono was genuinely perplexed that he couldn't land a Top 40 single off their 2014 and 2017 albums.

 

Id really love to see them go back and do something left field and daring, leave the Adult Contemporary radio hits to Coldplay.

 

I'm going back to the other albums for a bit and I think Four Out of Five might be my favorite song by them

 

track by track interview for my fellow curious nerds. There’s a joke about James Bond that to me adds credence to what we were discussing before about them “trying” for a bond theme

 

four out of five sounds more like a bond song than anything here

 

I don't know, Sculptures could make a pretty strong case for a Bond theme song.

 

the Bond talk is weirdly reductive considering that series isnt really actually known to have baroque / chamber pop genre music. the original theme is big band / surf.

its a very funny idea to me that maybe a certain type of person listening to this would think wow they really wrote a James Bond influenced album here.

also is there a more overrated IP than Bond? how many 2.5 hr 6.0 on imdb movies can you make

 

The last three Bond movie songs won best original song Oscars or something like that though

 

Although I don’t think there’s a ton on this album that would lend itself to a Bond theme (Mirrorball, maybe Big Ideas?), the general take that this is a band that would knock a Bond theme out of the park is hard to argue. It just seems like a good match to a lot of people, for a variety of reasons, so it’s exciting when evidence of that crops up.

I think you can find a few songs in Alex’s discography (including the Last Shadow Puppets albums) that just feel like Bond songs of old. Not sure there’s a better example than My Mistakes Were Made For You.

Regardless, it’s fun to imagine some of these songs playing over Binder-esque opening titles. It just works.

 

Not reductive for Alex
Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner: 'I'd love to write a James Bond theme'