It’s tempting to say that in promoting their second album as the Last Shadow Puppets, Miles Kane and Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner haven’t exactly done themselves any favours. Their debut, The Age of the Understatement, was a widely acclaimed collection of string-laden ballads and melodramatic 60s pop, pleasing proof that Turner could do more than knock out smart indie disco hits about teenage life in Sheffield.
Eight years on, however, things seem to have taken a different turn. Even leaving aside the interview during which Kane apparently made a pass at Spin magazine’s Rachel Brodsky – he subsequently offered a written apology, which understandably didn’t stop Brodsky writing at length about how uncomfortable and objectified the experience made her feel – the duo seem to have gone out of their way to make the reconstituted Last Shadow Puppets appear less like a band with a purpose than a smirking in-joke between a bored millionaire rock star and his pal. All the signs are there, from the photos of the pair mugging for the camera in matching leather outfits, clinking champagne glasses in the front row of a fashion show, to Turner’s habit of answering straightforward questions with the kind of faintly smug, curlicued waffle he deployed in his fabled Brits acceptance speech a couple of years back: “We exchanged sentiments from the ‘we have to do this again’ paradigm with conviction, but we knew the promises we were making might be too juicy to keep.”
If their second album together is lightly peppered with tracks that sound exactly like the work of a side-project, recorded during downtime for want of something better to do, and doubtless more fun to make than they are to listen to – not even arranger Owen Pallett’s way with a string section can lift Bad Habits or The Element of Surprise – Everything You’ve Come to Expect is a substantially worthier album than the duo’s in-joking suggests. Weirdly, the pair’s interviews seem more self-indulgent than their approach to music. The album’s currency is three-minute pop songs, some of them genuinely great. As a writer who arrived in the public consciousness words-first, Turner’s melodic skill sometimes gets overlooked, but there’s a real sumptuousness to the tunes of Miracle Aligner and Dracula Teeth. It’s less musically focused than their debut, but also less inclined to lapse into straightforward pastiche.
So eager was The Age of the Understatement to pay homage to Scott Walker that it occasionally sounded like a historical recreation: by contrast, the occasional period details here – the combination of basslines and rolling breakbeat drums drawn from Melody Nelson-era Serge Gainsbourg; the bolero-like staccato rhythm and slapback echo-drenched vocal on Sweet Dreams TN; the title track’s harpsichord-backed hint of toytown psychedelia – never overwhelm the sound of the album, deftly woven as they are amid distorted and tremolo-heavy guitars and vocals treated with electronic effects. Nor do Pallett’s arrangements – which hint at everything from Jean-Claude Vannier to Johnny Allen’s work with Isaac Hayes in the late 60s and early 70s – ever feel like wan impersonations: from the opening echoing scrape of strings on Aviation to the closing shimmer of The Dream Synopsis, via the high-drama stabs that punctuate She Does the Woods, they’re thrillingly inventive.
If the Spin incident doesn’t overshadow the music, it certainly casts an uncomfortable pall over the album’s lyrics. These are frequently blessed with Turner’s characteristically sparkling use of language – “I walk through the chalet of the shadow of death”, runs one line in the title track; “You’ve got a leaning tower of pint pots in your hand”, he observes on The Dream Synopsis – which goes some way to ameliorate the growing fear that this is yet another post-Drake album on which a grateful world is furnished with the information that being rich and successful and living a life of luxurious hedonism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But the lyrics are also big on tales of swashbuckling bachelorhood in the Hollywood hills. You’re never that far from a candlelit exchange with a señorita who raises the temperature, or “a hotel-room free-love revival” or indeed an invitation to have it off of varying degrees of directness – “Let me know when you want your socks knocking off”; “Where do you want it – your decision”; “Baby, we ought to fuck” – all of which might have felt a little more knowing and ironic had one half of the duo not taken it upon himself to behave like a leering twerp in public. As it is, you fancy you can detect something a bit distasteful in their worldview: an arrogance and entitlement that all that clever wordplay can’t quite cover.
For better or for worse, it seems highly likely that most people will be unbothered by its charmlessness. Turner is one of the few bankable names left in British alt-rock; so bankable, in fact, that the considerable strengths and notable failings of Everything You’ve Come to Expect seem almost beside the point. Its success seems assured.
