Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

I couldn't tell you anything about this album aside from the fact that it blended seamlessly into the background to the point I didn't even realize it was over for at least 10 minutes.

There was a Scott Walker album on the 1,001 list where I said his style must've inspired guys like Interpol and The Arctic Monkeys. I immediately thought of Walker when I heard the first song. I also thought of Richard Hawley's entry on the 1,001 list and Alex Turner's side project The Last Shadow Puppets. All of those other artists and bands were better than this though. Couldn't wait for the album to end and not going to listen again.

This is an Alex Turner solo album and should never have been released under the Arctic Monkeys name. It feels very long (even at only 40 minutes) and the songs all have the exact same sound and tempo… But the worst part of it all? The fact that Matt Helders, one of his generation’s most underrated drummers, is being held hostage on this bore of an album. Hell, he isn’t even the drummer on every track! It’s not quite a 1 in itself, but it’s a disgrace that this is a Monkeys-album.

I have never listened to their non extremely famous gongs (like a whole album at a time) and tbh this was nothing fancy. I do see influence and recognize why they are famous, but just not my cup of tea.

Kinda groaned seeing this one (although I do like the cover) - not at all a fan based on what I've previously heard from them. But in reading that this was a massive departure I thought ok ... open mind... And as the music starts with the first track I'm immediately liking it more, until the loungey-vocals come in and it just turns me right off. Every song. A nice effort, and I can see why people could dig this - but I'll never get by the horrible voice, vocal effects, and dumb lyrics. I don't like Bowie at all and this is ... a far worse imitation - I'd rather have the 8 Bowie albums again. 4/10 2 stars. IMO: Belonged in the book? No.

A bit dull tbh!

Arctic Monkeys’ first two albums lit a firework under the UK indie scene and pioneered a new wave of pub rock bands. Their two following albums were a bit moodier and more psychedelic - they showed they had range and that they were friend with Josh Homme now. Then came AM, a staggeringly huge record which was inescapable for years, and solidified the Monkeys as one the biggest rock bands of the 21st century. It would have been so easy to follow it up with AM 2 and live off the diminishing returns for another few albums, but instead they took the left-field option. I’m really glad they did as Tranquility Base is so so much more interesting and exciting than if they tried to just recycle their already quite derivative brand of blues rock revival. Shame it fucking sucks though. It’s a pretty wild concept - Turner is this lounge singer on a luxury resort on the moon, and this gives them an excuse to chuck in a load of sci-fi references and then not really do anything else with the concept. It’s so wild it could just about work, but Turner doesn't have the self-awareness to play into the silliness of it all and pull it off Richard Cheese style, and instead it’s a pretentious half-baked mess. A lot of the vocals are out of his range as well and he just doesn’t have the mic presence to carry it - his swagger from AM is weirdly gone and he struggles his way through song after song. It’s not all bad - the instrumentation is often fun and plays into the spacy concept even if the songs often meander and don’t deliver. Some of the tracks that do hit are the cool scene-setting opener Star Treatment, Four Out of Five which is the closest this has to a single, and She Looks Like Fun which is the only song where Turner seems to be in on the gimmick - it’s got this haunted funfair vibe and sounds absolutely batshit and is just a lot of fun. I guess my main issue with the album is that so much of it just sounds like nothing. It has this really unique and actually quite fruitful concept that is just not played into enough. If they leaned into the silliness more, it would make the experimentation worth it - if they had more fun with it, it would be more fun to listen to. As it stands it’s a failed experiment and ultimately quite forgettable - and no concept album about a lounge singer on the fucking moon should be forgettable! - and while AM endured for many years after its release, I think Tranquility Base is already starting to be lost in time… like tears in the rain

Not a huge fan tbh

I've really wanted to be the guy that likes the Arctic Monkeys. I tried really hard on the album that had "I bet you look good on the dancefloor", a song I like, but I just can't get into them. I think this is our third album of theirs and it hasn't hit yet.

This brand of modern art lounge pop is a bit too much and is definitely not really for me. I know this band had at least one album on the original list, they probably didn't need another one.

Oh dear. I know he's from Sheffield &, even better, a Wednesdayite, but my goodness this is truly awful.

It’s gotta be a generational thing. I’ve tried and I just do not get the appeal of this band. Like, if I’m in the mood for space age lounge music, I’m picking up a Stereolab record and, musically, I don’t think anything on this record comes close to competing with them. It may be due in part to Alex Turner’s vocal style. His songs are always very busy vocally and the music doesn’t feel like it has a chance to breathe. That works when you’re aping Gang Of Four on your debut, not as much here. The music here seems to just be a bed to lay his voice on top of and not much more - a complaint I also had about his Last Shadow Puppets record.

Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is really bad, I don't like AM anyway but this isn't even them, it's some self-indulgent shit from Turner wanting to cement his legacy as an iconic performer who transcends genres and instead it's just woefully poor. 1/5.

Is this a troll inclusion? No one seriously likes this shlock, right?

Awful. Are they making it up as they go along? 'Saturday night...Sunday morning' was magnificent, but nothing they've done since comes anywhere close.

Eh. Didn’t enjoy.

This is fuckin garbage. Trying so hard. Yes, it avoids the androcentric aggression of earlier Arctic Monkeys, but still manages to capture the arrogance, the sneering disdain. The work of someone who couldn't separate acclaim from value. Fortunately it isn't an over-long album, although that doesn't stop it feeling both overlong and obnoxiously repetitive - four stars out of five ain't gonna happen. Sorry lads.

I hate Arctic monkeys. And they found a way to make me hate them even more. They went lounge. This was awful.

Let's give it to Alex Turner. Starting with this album, he has become a world expert in the difficult and even perilous art of auto-fellatio. Such skills, requiring flexibility and a lot of patience, should be commended, I guess... Not every man (or artist) can give himself a blowjob and then let the whole world see the results. What is about to follow is a very long rant, and I *do* get the irony here. Maybe I should drink my own medicine when I criticize Turner constantly looking at himself in the mirror. I'm just a nobody and he's a world-famous artist. So why should you bother about some guy hating this album "with a passion"? What is it gonna bring you? Not much, I admit. The thing is, whenever I "criticize" some piece of music, I want to people to understand where the criticism subjectively comes from. It's a little too convenient to say "this is good/bad stuff" and not explain your own metrics. And this takes time. It would also take some cake to accuse me of being bad at self-editing when Arctic Monkey's are so utterly terrible at it in this record. I'm not talking about the individual songs' lengths here, or even the length of the whole album. I'm talking about the pointless meanderings in the songs (as short as they are), which could have been replaced with something else -- something *better*. Turner's skills don't include a knack for memorable hooks or any dynamic flair that could have helped the man structure his compositions away from the self-indulgent drivel often polluting this record for instance. Likewise, the so-called "psychedelic" overtones sprinkled throughout this LP are often quite stale. They evoke a simulacrum that's ironically of the sort the cryptic lyrics in this record seem to parody or criticize. Yet in spite of that (involuntary?) mirror effect, the thing fails to leave you with any deep thoughts about (post)modern online "simulations". What you have instead is just a bad taste in your mouth, lingering after 40 minutes of listening to Turner mostly singing to himself or a nearby love interest, in between two indirect allusions about virtual reality or politics, all of this with his pocket mirror at hand. Reading David Foster Wallace doesn't mean you have the chops to become his pop music equivalent overnight, mind you. Nor that you have the right angle for such endeavor in the first place. Likewise, vintage or retro textures straddling the pastiche line just for the sake of it do not always make exciting music either, whether old or "new". And neither do pointless ramblings about fame or consumerism or the internet automatically make great lyrical contents -- all those frankly sickening, hackneyed metaphors, or those unfunny puns such as "Star Treatment" in the opening track having the same name, they are just... grating. "Bear with me, man, I lost my train of thoughts," goes Turner at the end of the inoffensive second song, "One Point Perspective". You sure did, Alex. You sure did. But you've actually lost us from the get-go. The problem is that you're just using all those dystopian elements and ideas sprinkled throughout the lyrics to mostly speak about yourself and your feelings as a famous British rock star now feeling disconnected from the real world right after settling in LA. Hence why you're losing your "train of thoughts". Yet one can sense that you're still in quite a comfortable position, no matter how disconnected you are. So you can still play it cool, and with similarly cool vintage music in the background. Stanley Kubrick, obviously in Turner's mind as he populates his moon colony with all sorts of different "characters", sometimes applied those sorts of distanciated tricks to describe dystopia, of course. But then, Kubrick would break the big guns, the Strauss or Beethoven brass section blasting their way through the glossy screen to jolt the viewer. But where are the big guns in this record? Nowhere to be heard or seen. Not that *everything* is downright terrible or fully complacent in *Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino*. The music suddenly gets more interesting on third cut "American Sports", for example, thanks to that trippy, psychedelic organ in the background. But this specific cut is no real song, it's basically just a nicely instrumented short interlude with some vocal parts on it. The title track's is also OK, I guess, but "Golden Trunks" is definitely not: I dare anyone in here to convince me it's not a totally pointless dirge on a purely musical standpoint. Single "Four Out Of Five" thus instantly erases any memory of that so-called "song" which preceded it, thanks to its main hook, chorus and well-crafted final build-up. Unfortunately, the supposedly "meta" lyrics in the song -- actually just plain narcissistic -- are a little annoying, and even sometimes as grating as the bridge changing keys just because, well... why not? "I can lift you up another semitone", croons Turner during that bridge. Er... OK. What for, though? Does that make the song per se any better? In all honesty, Geordie Greep is a little more astute at sending those kinds of meta winks to the audience these days. Plus, he's better at layering his own parodic, borderline-cheesy instrumentation into something that truly sounds lively and one-of-a-kind. Cue Arctic Monkey's terrible waltzy, schmaltzy meanderings of "The World's First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip" in comparison, to witness everything that must NOT be attempted in that sort of parodic endeavor. It's just a cut that's totally dull. And once again, it's self-indulgent as f*ck. That's all too bad, because the deep synth tones of "Science Fiction" (probably one of the three cuts you can fully salvage here, along with the title-track and "Four Out Of Five") are great. And at least there's a thematic scope in the lyrics that's useful for once. But then, we grudgingly dive into the heavy-handed main riff of "She Looks Like Fun", alternating with more Serge Gainsbourg-adjacent shenanigans in anything but a graceful fashion. The seams are *so* visible here. And what's aggravating in this particular cut is that its protagonist knows he is just a boring prick, and yet tries to be a smart Alec (Alex?) about it: "Finally, I can share with you through cloudy skies / Every whimsical thought that enters my mind / There's no limit to the length of the dickheads we can be" Yeah sure, this here is also a barely veiled satire about social media, and I guess Alex includes himself in the people he criticizes, which is not a bad move on paper. The thing is, we never EVER get beyond the "dickheads" level. Bukowski is mentioned right after, by the way, and quite logically. One does not dare imagining how tedious and tiring Bukowski would have been in the digital age. So it checks out, I imagine... Then, a little later: "I'm so full of shite / I need to spend less time stood around in bars / Waffling on to strangers all about martial arts / And how much I respect them / Key changes..." Please no. Not *another* meta joke about key changes. Please. And if you don't want to be seen as a narcissistic twat, just stop wallowing in the thing that makes you look like such in the first place. Who cares what you tell those people about yourself in bars??? This constant look in the mirror is simply unbearable, just as Turner's next aimless, meandering vocals and lyrics in penultimate track "Batphone", that I don't even want to delve into. Just shut up, man. Shut up. The drowsy, aptly-named "The Ultracheese" then ends the proceedings on a final bum note. Once again, the whole thing is just terrible, devoid of any clear musical direction, just like that weird conclusion ending on a harmonic question mark. The vocals sound forced at times. The meter is often awful and verbose. It's everything good music involving a singer singing lyrics shouldn't be. And I'm not only talking about the last song in this LP here... I'm talking about *all the other duds* in it. Three or four decent cuts... A fistful of other discrete moments extracted from a couple of tracks here and there... *That's* the total sum of the music that's listenable in this thing. Everything else just... sucks. And might also incidentally explain why even among Arctic Monkeys fans, the once-stellar reputation the band originally had live has been sullied in the recent years. Maybe because their new artistic direction is mostly a chatty overrated borefest, and it shows onstage whenever they play new stuff (from this album and the next one). Simply put, the once fun and witty working-class garage kids have now turned to consensual bourgeois musicians, crooning about imaginary resorts for the space elite while expressing some distant irony about the whole situation (that's sadly never mordant or biting). To which you can add ultimately empty self-referential allusions here and there. OK, maybe Arctic Monkeys were never truly 'working class' in the first place. But if that's the case, at least that one simulacrum sounded far better than its latest iteration. To finish, one thing about the album artwork: it is admittedly gorgeous, and evocative of an interesting "concept" on paper. Yet you get it by now, said "concepts" are not necessarily conducive to genuine artistic success. So let this overall failure be a warning for future generations of musicians when the time comes up for them to renew their game. After all, said warning is often included in the album's lyrics anyway - a rare case where the poorly inspired artist is so defensive he automatically gives ammunition to his most fierce detractors: Cue the conclusion of *Science Fiction*: "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 / The way some science fiction does". I guess the comparison makes sense. Only in a parallel universe such as one explored in a sci-fi flick can *Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino* be considered as an "essential" album. 1/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums (not exactly "Four Out Of Five" for this taqueria, huh?) 6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1) ---- Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ---- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 0 for now Albums from the users list I *might* include in mine later on: 0 for now Albums from the users list I won't include in mine: 1 (including this one)