By Esme Warmuth
Recently, while cleaning out my bedroom, I threw Arctic Monkeys’ sixth studio album Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino onto my record player and listened to the album in its entirety —a semi-frequent occurrence for me since its 2018 release.
I love pretty much everything Alex Turner, frontman of Arctic Monkeys, has ever written—his impeccably cool, guitar-heavy rock songs about unrequited love were the soundtrack to my high school experience—and this album is no exception. It balances an almost painful degree of self-awareness with a hazy egotism. At the time of its release, the album felt like Arctic Monkeys’ most relatable and personal album, despite being set against the backdrop of a fictional hotel on the moon.
Arctic Monkeys released this album following a five-year hiatus, during which Turner spent a few years away from the Arctic Monkeys covering Ziggy Stardust songs on the road with collaborator Miles Kane (aka the uncredited male voice on Lana Del Rey’s Dealer), in a David Bowie inspired side-band called The Last Shadow Puppets.
The Last Shadow Puppets – Moonage Daydream @ Glastonbury 2016
Alex Turner and I share an almost fanatic–in my case, definitely fanatic–love of David Bowie, and Bowie’s spirit is interwoven into Tranquility Base like a soul giving life to a body.
Bowie took inspiration from space and the idea of aliens throughout his career, from his early song “Space Oddity” to his 1976 role as an alien in the film The Man Who Fell To Earth. The most notable example of his fascination lies in his 1972 concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, which casts Bowie, once again, as an alien. The parallel between Bowie’s album, and Alex Turner’s choice to cast himself as an employee of a celestial hotel and casino in Tranquility Base, is clear—both albums seem to both hide and find truth in the idea of being from anywhere but Earth.
Bowie’s influences—both musically and conceptually—on Tranquility Base are palpable, which could explain why I love it so much. As fond as I am of the heavy electric guitar and catchy hooks of early Arctic Monkeys albums, Tranquility Base feels like stepping into something both new and all-consumingly nostalgic. Listening to it felt a bit like getting a whole new Bowie album, two years after Bowie’s death.
Regardless of its influences, Turner is uniquely himself on this album, amping up all the eccentricities of his prior albums, and jam-packing songs with personal references and drawn out metaphors. Unlike prior albums which credited co-writers, Turner wrote Tranquility Base alone, with a single Steinway Vertegrand piano and a Tascam 388 8-track tape recorder.
The album’s open song, “Star Treatment,” is an understated narrative in which Turner reflects on fame, modern society and the pressures of success. Musically, the song invokes familiar themes, evoking the soundtrack suite to the 1968 movie Barbarella, which Turner has referenced throughout his career, and David Bowie’s 1969 self-titled album, David Bowie AKA Space Oddity.
“I just wanted to be one of The Strokes / Now look at the mess you made me make,” Turner informs the audience in the album’s opening line. It’s unclear whether “the mess” in question is the album itself or something else, but this self-deprecating line sets the tone for an album full of tongue-in-cheek references to Turner’s life and career. “I’m a big name in deep space, ask your mates / The golden boy’s in bad shape,” he quips in the same verse.
Arctic Monkeys: Star Treatment (TRNSMT 2018)
Tranquility Base was the highly anticipated follow up to Arctic Monkeys’ most successful album, AM, a moniker used interchangeably with the band’s name. Instead of attempting to replicate the previous album, Turner seems to look back on his enormous boom in success with slight confusion and exasperation in Tranquility Base.
I’m all too familiar with burnout in my personal life. I love writing, but the pressure to create things that are both marketable and true to me as a person is difficult to balance. I look at Tranquility Base as an album for the burned-out-former-gifted-kid. Turner has no desire to pander to fans of his more iconic guitar riffs and catchy choruses. Instead, he spills his soul out in trippy, piano-heavy songs that are brimming with complex metaphors and absurdist lyrics. In “Star Treatment,” he demands of the listener: “So who you gonna call? The Martini Police?” and “What do you mean you’ve never seen Blade Runner?”
These lyrics are abjectly ridiculous—Jon Dolan at Rolling Stone Magazine said that the listening to the album played live might be better than listening to the record, “So you could hear (Turner) fuck with people in real time,”—but I smile as I listen to them, because for me, they represent the defiant rejection of commercialization and commodification of art. It’s difficult to commodify an album that simply does not care what you think of it.
In “One Point Perspective,” Turner rambles on abstractly about a movie he saw, but buried within the lyrics seems to be a second meaning — a rueful understanding of his own role as a creator.
Arctic Monkeys – One Point Perspective live 2018 Maida Vale
Singsong ‘Round ‘The Moneytree’
This stunning documentary that no one else unfortunately saw
Such beautiful photography, it’s worth it for the opening scene
I’ve been driving ’round, listening to the score
Or maybe, I just imagined it all
These lyrics are applicable to the album itself, as well as the movie he’s referencing. Tranquility Base is special to me, but I rarely meet other fans of the band who like it, or have even listened to it all the way through, despite Arctic Monkeys’ huge success as a band. “I love the band, but hate their new stuff,” is an all-too-common sentiment. A boy in a concert pit once told me that Alex Turner was “over” and the much younger, but equally sad, Northern guitarist and singer Sam Fender was taking his place.
Just as Turner describes the unfortunate lack of awareness about the movie, I often tell people it’s terrible that more fans don’t give Tranquility Base a chance. Despite my disappointment over the lack of appreciation for this album, I still find myself feeling like I’m part of something special as one of the few people who actually take the time to listen and appreciate it. As is the case with the above verse, I often feel like I’m listening to hidden messages, buried within dreamlike lyrics. Turner hides his most personal and relatable messages in his most ridiculous songs.
Such is the case with the title track of the album, in which Turner opens with the lyric: “Jesus in the day spa,” setting the scene for a song that is both overarchingly existential and narratively intriguing. This song embodies the quandary of having to go about a normal life while being weighed down by constant existential doubt. Turner muses, “I’ve been on a bender back to that prophetic esplanade / Where I ponder all the questions / But just manage to miss the mark, hoo-hoo”
Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (Official Video)
Later in the song, Turner paints a deeply apt and simultaneously hilarious depiction of balancing mental health with the pressures of society: turning to superstition and magic to retain sanity.
This magical thinking
Feels as if it really might catch on
Mama wants some answers
Do you remember where it all went wrong?
The thesis statement of the album comes towards the very end of the titular track, in a simple outro during which Turner sings:
And do you celebrate your dark side
And then wish you’d never left the house?
Have you ever spent a generation
Trying to figure that one out?
This simple set of queries sums up the questions that Turner is seeking to answer with this album. He had, at this point in his career, reached the very pinnacle of fame, but is still asking questions about how to be happy.
I relate deeply to this as a perfectionist. It sometimes feels like nothing I can ever do will be good enough, and even when I do achieve my goals, I wonder what I sacrificed to get there. I, too, wonder if I’ll ever figure that one out.
Deep thoughts stemming from a song that later references the moon’s side boob.
Throughout the rest of the album, Turner vacillates wildly between the bitingly sad and humorous lyrics that are so strange, it’s hard to imagine him sitting down and writing them. Despite this, Turner’s sharp self-awareness of how his own lyrics must sound to the listener never waivers.
The track “Science Fiction” starts out, “Religious iconography givin’ you the creeps? / I feel rougher than a disco lizard tongue along your cheek,” and ends with Turner softly singing, “So I tried to write a song to make you blush / But I’ve a feeling that the whole thing / May well just end up too clever for its own good.”
It’s easy to lose the plot of Turner’s lyrics and intentions in this album, but throughout the surrealist, aesthetic lyrics, Turner’s deep, personal thoughts after consistently included. Halfway through “Science Fiction,” he professes, “I wanna make a simple point about peace and love / But in a sexy way where it’s not obvious.”
With the album’s final song, “The Ultracheese,” Turner comes back to earth in an acoustic breakup ballad that centers around the passage of time and his inability to repeat the past.
In an album full of metaphors and double-meanings that have taken me years to decode—though of course, there’s no correct answer—“The Ultracheese” is so straightforward and earnest, it holds a place as my favorite song.
Turner performed this song on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and appeared uncharacteristically overcome with emotion during the final minute of the song—and I say this as someone who has watched many, many Arctic Monkeys live performances. He breaks out of his usual too-cool character and takes off his iconic sunglasses to reveal tearful eyes before singing of old friends:
Trust the politics to come along
When you were just trying to orbit the sun
When you were just about to be kind to someone
Because you had the chance
I still got pictures of friends on the wall
The verse speaks to how deeply emotional and evocative this song is in the context of the band’s usual music style. It feels simultaneously like a hello and a goodbye.
Arctic Monkeys Perform ‘The Ultracheese’
With one final moment of levity at the end of this song, Turner sings: “I might look as if I’m deep in thought / But the truth is, I’m probably not / If I ever was.”
This line puts a cap on an unparalleled album. Turner doesn’t take his own existentialism too seriously, nor does he expect anyone to listen to it—he even seems to foreshadow the album’s less-than-perfect ratings with the track “Four Out of Five” which discusses “It was well reviewed / four stars out of five / and that’s unheard of”—but regardless, he does create it, and put it out into the world for anyone who might want to listen to it. The choice on his part to create such a unique and divisive album solidified my respect for him as an artist and creator. I’ll never stop revisiting it, because on any given day it can provide the background for a long drive, something to laugh at…or music for an existential crisis. If you ever have a free hour to sit and read through the lyrics, be prepared to laugh at them, then process them, question everything, and then maybe, fall in love with them.
RhetComp 