Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino

It's a strange, wonderful album, one that almost feels like Arctic Monkeys have embarked on their own full-band side-project. [Jul 2018, p.106]

While a change of pace, none of these songs will sound unfamiliar to fans, or really could have been created by anyone else except a very talented parodist. Ultimately, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is just a snappy new outfit for a group that knows experimentation and diversity are keys to longevity.

For all this record’s hubris, the long-touted “generational voice” that is Alex Turner has never sounded more real, or more himself.

The first listen may be surprising, but repeated listens illuminate that Arctic Monkeys remain progressive and energetic even when style and mood shift dramatically.

It takes a few listens for this space oddity to come into focus, but Tranquility Base gradually proves itself a rather daring reinvention. It’s poetic and expansive, subdued yet spellbinding--altogether, one giant leap for Monkey-kind.

Once you ditch the notion that AM’s successor should rock like it, and give yourself up to rolling around in the psyche of one of our very greatest songwriters like an olive in a martini, then it’s a riveting and immersive listen--an album-bomb dropped without preceding singles, re-emphasising the importance of a cohesive work, rather than a shuffled, Spotified deconstruction.

There’s little to be found here with the immediacy of yore, but this ends up working in the album’s favor: the more you give in to these vibes, the more the vibes give back. That goes double for Turner’s lyrics, which are playfully quotable in a manner that recalls the opaque asides of Destroyer’s Dan Bejar.

The words themselves are glorious, as frequently absurd and brilliantly imaginative as some of the best sci-fi writers--Arthur C Clarke, Philip K Dick, HG Wells--while the instrumentation recalls their cinematic adaptations, or classic superhero cartoons.

This is a concise and clever record.

The music is stark and edgy, with inflections from doo-wop and heavy rock. Songs are ephemeral, and not easy to decipher without listening to them repeatedly.

If you're a long-time listener, or someone that was tuned in to AM, you might be prepared to change the dial. But before you write this off as exhausting or pretentious self-indulgence, give it a listen or two. Peruse the lyrics, dissect them and have a laugh. Commitment isn't as scary as you think.

All in all, the Monkeys' sixth long-player is a bold move. [Jun 2018, p.95]

At first it’s completely overwhelming--you’ll be trying to connect the scattered dots on this initially impenetrable listen, and maybe even despairing when it doesn’t all come together. But when the constellations show through, you’ll realise that it’s a product of searingly intelligent design.

The band are in fine form even as they step out of the spotlight, with synthesisers, organs, baritone guitar and other textural touches constantly hovering in the periphery. With no crunchy guitars to fill up the mix, O'Malley's basswork is the best it's ever been, anchoring all this sci-fi nonsense to something both earthly and indisputably funky. Discerning in all this where the space-age future rockstar ends and Alex Turner begins is a head-spinning task, fiction and real intertwined along knotty mobius strips of melodies which resolutely avoid radio hooks.

People will certainly be talking about Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino in the short term because of how much of a surprise it is, but it will be interesting to see how it will be talked about in the long-term.

Whilst your first few visits to the ‘Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino’ may feel alien and unwelcoming, you will gravitate ever closer to its shimmering outer-space treasures with each stay.

Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a good album. It trades out the pure indie rock edge of the band's entire discography to date for a fuzzy, alternative absurdism that can initially wrong-foot it's audience.

Turner nails the concept, wallowing in warped dreams and painting widescreen soundscapes, but the foundation is wobbly; at a glance, it's impressive, but the slipshod details reveal themselves upon close inspection.

It’s not the Arctic Monkeys you might expect, and living inside Alex Turner’s identity crisis can be an occasionally uncomfortable experience, but give it some time and this sixth album reveals itself as one of the most interesting of the band’s career.

Though Turner may be sardonic to a fault, making it difficult to determine where the snark ends and genuine sentiment begins, the album is audacious in its conceptual conceit, challenging expectations established through the boozy nightlife anthems of the band's earlier work with an experimental approach that's contemplative and unrepentantly abstruse.

Low-key but engrossing, Tranquility Base is a slow-burner, self-doubting but pushing ever onwards. It's a brave new step, even if it can be a little one-paced, and a little withholding. [Jun 2018, p.25]

Easily the weirdest record in the band’s catalog, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a fun, flawed aberration (at least, for now). Even in failure, there’s enough to explore within Turner’s thicket of lyrics and the haze of this inviting, yet not quite fully realized sonic setting to warrant a few active listens.

At turns thrilling, smug, clever and oddly cold, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is only a qualified success; there’s something quietly impressive about the fact that it exists at all, at least as an Arctic Monkeys album.

When the Arctic Monkeys’ career comes to be reappraised, this album could be seen as an outlier, or the start of their next phase. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but sometimes, dividing an audience is exactly what you need to do.

He shares the ennui, dissociation, irony and unfulfillment of his particular celebrity destiny, coupled with a biting and original take on a more widely shared quotidian anxiety that listeners will note with nods and laughs and hums of recognition. But a hit or two would have been nice.

An album that only even begins to click after about the tenth listen, Arctic Monkeys’ sixth is the kind of eyebrow-raising curveball that could still yet lead to brilliance.

Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino is the best possible kind of average record, one that goes out swinging. One that goes for it on every level. A record that, although it isn’t great by any typical metric, is extremely curious and entertaining.

It's not the first time a band of this stature chooses to find their confidence by taking it slow. But neither is it too daring or too unhinged; in fact, sans the slower, more methodical tempos, many of the songs still fall under their common pairing of doo-wop chord progressions and piercing guitars. So much of your appreciation for Tranquility may depend on how much you can stomach Turner's interpretative dance.

The album feels unmoored and even plodding due to a lack of structure.

It’s an uneven soundtrack to some early morning hotel lobby fever dream where the house-band drown in tight-collared Paul Smith suits and over-wrought orchestral-pop mimicry.