The One-Listen Lowdown #2 | AM by the Arctic Monkeys

A number of things have always drawn me to the Arctic Monkeys. First and foremost, they hail from just a few miles away from the village where I grew up, and their music seems to capture the quintessence of the area as it appears to those of our generation. For me, this lends their songs a raw sense of reality that’s heightened by their already-idiosyncratic and alluring sound, which remains unique irrespective of which genre they’re currently dabbling in. Perhaps most importantly of all though, they’re one of the best storytelling bands around today - their songs aren’t just music and lyrics, but short stories and evocative allegories fuelled by love, lust and drunken melodrama, and often capped with a torturous twist. With the Arctic Monkeys, you don’t so much buy an album as an aural anthology - and this fifth one is no different. “Takes a sip of your soul, and it sounds like...”

AM marks a significant moment in the band’s history as they’ve now reached those self-assured heights where they’re confident enough to forget about an encapsulating album title and just sign off on a record eponymously, or more accurately, in a Velvet Underground-inspired move, simply initial it. But with its deliberate “after midnight” mood and a cover that alludes to amplitude modulation, there’s far more to AM than meets the eye. Yes, it may be their untitled white album; their Blur, but it’s also something of a Zooropa.

“Do I Wanna Know?” is the band’s most effective album-opener since “Brianstorm”. Slow, heavy and driven by drums and spilt drinks on settees, the track builds a sense of mammoth expectation that the well-known 2012 single that follows it quickly delivers upon. Fusing the geek chic of Thunderbirds and Lone Ranger references with the Monkeys’ trademark skewed and insightful perspective, “R U Mine?” begs a question that the rest of the album looks to answer.

“From the bottom of your heart, the relegation zone,” croons Alex Turner at the start of AM’s third track, “One for the Road” - an experimental offering that pays homage to ’80s rock opera, littered with as many cutaway choruses as it is intriguing football metaphors. “Arabella” then sees the group turn back to more familiar territory with a tongue-twisting lovesong that has a pleasing penchant for cosmic similes.

The most outstanding track on the first side of the LP though is “I Want It All”, which sees the Sheffield songsters turned Californian bikers dial back a further decade to tap into the riffy, falsetto-filled world of the ’70s. Redolent of T-Rex, yet still inimitably the Arctic Monkeys, “I Want It All” has an intoxicating, radio-friendly feel that mark it out as a sure-fire future single. “No 1 Party Anthem”, conversely, actively eschews the inferences inevitably drawn from its title. It’s more of a dirge for the hesitant man stood alone in the corner devising “drunken monologues” than it is an anthem for those looking good on the dancefloor. Idle and insidious, and with a hook that feels like it should be slurred rather than sang, this song is AM at its most edgy; lyrically delightful in its languor.

After the pace-bomb, AM doesn’t even try to recover its verve immediately, the band electing to follow up their moody musings with a gentle and mellifluous interlude in the guise of “Mad Sounds” rather than deliver a wake-up belter. But like the second wind in the early hours, a “Fireside” fuse soon gets the tempo back up with a grandiose rock offering that reeks of the Killers.

Top-ten hit “Why D’You Only Ever Call Me When You’re High?” is vintage Arctic Monkeys, marred only by its brevity and a chorus that, on the first listen, seems to share a similar melody to that of “R U Mine?” There’s no marring “Snap Out of It”, however, which sounds very much like I’d imagine an Arctic Monkeys / Kaiser Chiefs supergroup would. What it lacks in lyrical weight it makes up for tenfold in catchiness - it’s the clear first-listen standout.

With the Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme on board, the salacious disco number “Knee Socks” is almost as instant a winner, but not quite. However, with its inventive “coughdrop-coloured tongue” and scruff-of-socks “sweet spots”, AM’s penultimate track is likely to grow into a firm favourite as I delve deeper.

The album concludes with a gentle, beautiful grind of track that’s abounding with as many ’leccy meters and Ford Cortinas as it is declarations of desire. “I Wanna Be Yours” might be the sort of trite title that involuntarily bleeds into the background, but the John Cooper Clarke-inspired mantra proves to be the vacuum cleaner to the listener’s dust.

The fifth of five genre-busting records linked by an unyielding South Yorkshire brogue and sharp-as-Sheffield writing, AM feels like the long-since-held ace up the Arctic Monkeys’ sleeves. It can’t match Favourite Worst Nightmare for fury or the haunting Humbug for power and weight, but it borrows a little of something from each album to date, adding a time-travelling, hip-hop vibe into the mix that hauls the listener over forty-odd years’ sounds in a little under forty minutes. The no-frills ‘sunglasses and soundwaves’ statement of a cover tells you everything that you need to know about this one. Suck it and see, you never know - you might just like it.

AM is available to download from Amazon for £6.99. The CD version is currently cheapest online at Play, where it’s currently on sale for £8.75, but at Amazon, you can get the CD bundled with an ‘Amazon AutoRip’ 256kbps MP3 download for just 24p more - only a pound more than you’d pay to iTunes for the download alone.