Suck It And See

Suck It And See. Give It A Try. So that's what I did. After hearing the mixed results that this new album gathered from friends and critics alike I decided to listen to this album with an open mind. So maybe this wasn't their greatest stuff. So what? It's still the Arctic Monkeys and that's saying a lot. 

Alex Turner does have a lot to say on this album, much more so than the sexy/creepy workout of Humbug, in which many of his lyrics played second fiddle to the instrumentation and overall mood of the album. Suck It And See is all about the wordplay. "I'm out of place and I'm not getting any wiser. Like the Sundance Kid behind a synthesizer," he croons, accompanied by spacious guitar on "Black Treacle." The lyrics to many of the songs on this album are memorable and a little undecipherable, like on "The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala": "I took the batteries out of my mysticism and put them in my thinking cap." Who really knows what that means but it's probably about deciphering the mysterious woman or the "hellcat." 

Speaking of which, many of the songs on this album have to do with  mesmerizing women and the finicky nature of love, but they deal with them in a normal (somewhat) way then the innate creepiness of Humbug (like "Crying Lightning" example).  However, Humbug has left its mark. Many of the songs main guitar parts drop out leaving the drums and bass to pound away in sync which is a trick they probably picked up from Josh Homme (I believe "Dangerous Animals" on Humbug is the first occurrence of this) and many of the faster and more opaque songs feature spiky, needle-sharp guitar solos not found on their pre-Humbug work. There are three main songs on the album that don't have the depth of song arrangement or substantiated wordplay of the rest of the album and, coincidentally, sound the most like Queens of The Stone Age (with the exception of maybe "All My Own Stunts"). These are "Don't Sit Down Cause I've Moved Your Chair," "Brick By Brick," and "Library Pictures." These three songs don't grab you by your throat as many Arctic Monkeys' songs have in the past and seem just like simply, yet catchy, jams. They offset the ballads in the rest of the album perfectly and the album seems incomplete without them. If the songs were taken out of the album, it would appear that the Monkeys would have forgotten how to rock because these three songs blister with heavy guitar and spiky solos. 

Overall all this album seems more of a reboot because the A.M's are taking in what they learned from Humbug out in the desert and applying it to the pop-savvy rockers of Whatever People Say. . .  and the effect is to show a band that can croon and can also rock and a band that can dissect a failed relationship with a view pointed phrases or just sit back and let the riff speak for itself.