For many people, this will have been their most anticipated album for a few years. The Age Of Understatement garnered quite a large fan base, but with Miles Kane and Owen Pallett pursuing solo projects, and Arctic Monkeys continuing to rule the UK, there hasn’t been anything from The Last Shadow Puppets in 8 years.
In the music world this can be equivalent to about a lifetime, because music shifts around so quickly that your sound could be dated by the time you put something new out, and this is especially true in the internet age when hype comes and dies out almost instantly. For fans though it’s even longer, but they still stay hopeful and hyped up regardless. I mean, MF DOOM fans are still waiting for Madvillainy 2, twelve years later, even though it’s unlikely to happen at this point. The hype remained for The Last Shadow Puppets though and like Macklemore’s This Unruly Mess I’ve Made album title, Everything You’ve Come To Expect aptly describes the album itself as well.
60s and 70s baroque pop channelled through 90s Britpop, the album essentially does what their debut did well. The production is still lush, and the strings glisten. What’s different this time, though, is that the songs are a little grittier; less clean than the first album, but the foundations are still there. The opening track ‘Aviation’ starts with a prominent guitar which sticks with you, and sticks around the whole song. The track feels like it’s going somewhere but it doesn’t build up to anything by the end so I’m only left with a feeling of wanting more, or just something different by the end.
The next few tracks give us more string based sounds, ‘Miracle Aligner’ offering a more sensual vibe across the track, almost sucking you into its dreamlike state, with one of the more memorable refrains on the album. After this though, the next few tracks become blurry, as if you were sucked into the dream of ‘Miracle Aligner’ and then fell asleep due to nothing grabbing your attention. The title track has the most forgettable vocals on the whole album, with the falsetto at the beginning of the track not working in the song’s favour at all.
One thing that weakened the first album was Miles Kane’s vocals cropping up every now and then but not really fitting in with the track; they were out of place and a little unnecessary. On this sophomore album Turner takes the majority of the vocals and it does work much better, but the vocal performances still lack quite a lot of the time, and it’s the instrumentals that are the most interesting part. Miles does take lead on ‘Pattern’, singing over a good instrumental, but he’s essentially mimicking Kasabian’s vocalist Tom Meighan and Alex Turner combined, to provide a very dull vocal performance.
The true element of surprise on the album though is ‘Bad Habits’, perhaps the ballsiest track they have ever made, and certainly ballsier than anything Arctic Monkeys have released in a while. The track sticks out with its fast pace and its bass driven rhythm, something the rest of the album really lacks. There really isn’t much fluidity amongst these songs, the track that follows is ‘Sweet Dreams, TN’ and this track feels incredibly stiff, but it does give us Alex Turner’s usual memorable lines with the lyric “It’s like everyone’s a dick without you baby”.
However, even lyrically there’s not a lot to say, and everything said gets lost in the sounds of the songs; the soaring strings provide nice background music but when it’s used in the same way on every song it becomes stale. I think everything they do here was done better on their first album, and in 8 years there hasn’t been much progression.
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