I was a huge Arctic Monkeys fan. But who wasn’t? Everyone I know likes one era of the band’s discography, from their energetic debut Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not or their smash commercial hit AM. To an extent, I’m still an Arctic Monkeys fan. But not like I was back then. Back then, they were my absolutely favorite band. Back then, in that post-AM sweet spot of 2013-2014, I knew all of the band members names, my eyes lit up whenever I saw someone with an Arctic Monkeys t-shirt, and I even had an Arctic Monkeys birthday cake.
But then they stopped.
The band took a five year hiatus, and now they’re back with Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. Which leaves one question: was it worth it?
The track “Star Treatment” is the perfect opener for the album. It lets everyone know that Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a new sound for the band, and not just an AM rebound. It provides the retro-Vegas-casino-but-also-on-the-moon theme of the album with the minimal instrumentals, slow pace, and Alex Turner’s rambling but smooth and seductive vocals echoing through the track. What really makes this song great aside from its melody is how frank yet grandeur the lyrics are. Half of the lyrics are Turner’s reflections on fame, especially with the first lines; “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes / Now look at the mess you made me make”, but the other half being as indulgent in the aesthetics of its own song as something out of a Lana Del Rey song; “Oh, maybe I was a little too wild in the 70’s”
The album then meanders. Which is its biggest flaw. Each song sounds different, “One Point Perspective” is focused on a bright piano lead, and is followed by the much darker “American Sports” with a disappearing and reappearing arpeggio but aside from a few songs on this album, there’s nothing to hold onto. It all sounds pleasant, and the style is consistent while varied enough, but it’s all very slow and watery. Which is fine, a lot of great albums are the same, but those albums make up for it with lyrical content. The lyrics on Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino aren’t bad, and do have some great moments like on “Star Treatment”, and still has it’s strange moments (which I call Alex Turnerisms), notably on “She Looks Like Fun”, with the hopefully never-forgotten line “Goodmorning cheeseburger”. But despite this, the lyricism is never able to make up for the lack of interesting song structure that prevails on this album.
The title track has a great dark atmosphere and a baseline that holds the song together, but everything else on it feels so uninspired and directionless, especially the chorus. It’s not a song that’s hard to listen to or anything, but it’s song that does not justify its own existence, let alone place on the record.
The badwill wrought on upon by this song is quickly swept under the rug by “Golden Trunks”. “Golden Trunks” is a legitimately strange song, with Turner’s strange vocal inflections and a guitar riff that sounds like it could’ve been from Queen of the Stone Age’s 2013 LP ...Like Clockwork. You may notice I mention Turner a lot in the album, but I really have to. He’s truly the star of it, which makes sense knowing that at one point this project was proposed an Alex Turner solo album.
What follows “Golden Trunks” is the second reason this album is worth staying awake through the filler tracks, the song “Four Out of Five” (“Star Treatment” being the first reason, obviously). “Four Out of Five” has the same atmosphere and an equally powerful bassline as “Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino” but actually builds up to a chorus that has a good hook and feels like a release of the energy given from the verses. Y’know. Like a good song. What I really love about this track is how Turner is solely focused on the theme of the hotel and casino on the Moon. It’s half worldbuilding, where he talks about all of the details of this location and the acclaimed Taqueria on the roof, but half an advertisement, he just piles praise upon praise of this place, to the point where the chorus is him just stating the rating of the Taqueria and how impossible it is for something to be that good. In addition, his singing gets more and more passionate throughout the song, and is the most it gets on the entire album. It’s as if this place is real and his only chance of being able to pay for his rent is if you actually go to Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, so he really wants you to go. It’s an odd way of doing it, but the song acts as an interesting yet light metaphor for fame.
After this song, you could just stop listening to the album, carry on with your life, and not worry about a thing (unless you really want to hea
r that “Good morning cheeseburger” line). It’s not a pain to finish the album, and “She Looks Like Fun” is a solid track, it’s off the walls in a very respectable way (which actually does pull of the “Good morning cheeseburger” line). And the closing track is something you’d hear in a movie when a character is down on his luck at a bar before getting into a fight. It’s unique for the album, but not extraordinary. It’s sweet, but not a perfect sendoff.
It’s hard to way whether Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is worth the five year wait or not. It’s such a departure from the band’s typical sound, so it’s feels weird to even compare it to their other work. And despite its quirks, the album isn’t breaking a lot of ground. It seems like a lot of these sounds have been done better by Alex Turner’s other band, The Last Shadow Puppets. The album is the equivalent to a ride at a theme park that’s kind of boring but provides air conditioning on a hot day so it’s pleasant but doesn’t really do much. It just kind of exists. Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a 6 out of 10.
★★★★★★☆☆☆☆