Arctic Monkeys Humbug review

Most songwriters use the second person– the ever-elusive and usually-anonymous “you” to whom love songs are generally addressed– but Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys has an unusual knack for making the conventional “you” almost intrusively familiar. “Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secure,” from their first album, starts with the words,

We’ll ask if we can have six, then.
If not, we’ll have to have two.
Well, you’re coming up at our end aren’t ya,
so I’ll get one wi’ you.

The song continues with its chatty address: “You see her in the green dress? She talked to me at the bar… Didn’t you see, she were gorgeous!” describing scenes as if “you,” his hearer, are so much a part of the night’s events that your momentary absence has to be explained away:

How funny were that sketch earlier,
up near that taxi rank?
Oh no, you will have missed it,
think it were when you went to the bank…

Whoever you are, it’s hard to resist the perspective the song offers: a mate’s-eye view of a Sheffield lad on a night out, arguing with the driver, chatting up a girl, sharing this and that– anecdotes, glimpses, plots, defeats– with a casual intimacy that pulls you in and settles you down for the length of the song.

Humbug, Arctic Monkeys’ latest album, starts out with a different kind of intimacy. “My Propellor,” a languidly obscene plea– “Coax me out, my love, and have a spin of my propellor”– rhymes “urgency” with “emergency” before building to its end with a repeated wail of: “My propellor won’t spin, and I can’t get it started on my own. When are you arriving?” The stress on the lover’s absence, and the reiterated plea, build a certain discomfort in the listener; as a stranger who hears a baby crying tends to want to go pick it up, Turner’s cries for a “you” who isn’t “arriving” get the listener involved in the scene whether she wants to be or not.

Turner’s persona on this album is no longer quite the cheerfully lecherous, club-hopping Sheffield lad, whether up-and-coming or already scrappily indignant about the pitfalls of fame and fortune, who featured on his last two albums; he’s developed a dreamlike focus on one thing and one thing only, and that thing tends to be “you”– whoever “you” are. “Crying Lightning,” the second track and first single, featuring a more specific “you”– one who does magic tricks and talks with her mouth full of candy– also fleshes out this new “I” of the album. After Turner’s characteristic half-nasty, half-admiring description of the object of his desire, the second verse of “Crying Lightning” begins with a tossed-off helplessness: “The next time that I caught my own reflection it was on its way to meet you.” We meet that reflection at the same time that the “you” of the song does; it’s a creature whose cravings and urges draw it on against the will of the conscious self, which is still “thinking of excuses to postpone.” It’s that same unconsciousness that allows the singer to penetrate “your” defenses: “Uninviting,” he sings of the girl in question, “but not half as impossible as everyone assumes you are.” Everyone except me goes without saying, but the reasons behind this exception are noteworthy; it’s not because, with his quick wit and street smarts, the singer naturally understands the object of his desire better than anyone else (although he does), but because despite that understanding he’s caught, like a sleepwalker, moving towards her whether either of them likes it or not. “Your profile could not hide the fact you knew I was approaching your throne,” he sings, and after a line or two describing her defensive posturing, “Though I tried so not to suffer the indignity of reaction/ There was no crack to grasp or gap to claw.” (Take a moment; sometimes I need a cigarette after lines like that.) Last seen writhing in bed begging for help with his, uh, propellor, the singer now draws a picture of a similarly helpless flailing for purchase, trying not to fall into “the indignity of reaction.” But if that hope wasn’t lost already, it’s certainly gone now, and won’t be back for the rest of the album.

“You should have racing stripes, the way you keep me in pursuit,” purrs “Dangerous Animals,” which opened with more writhing: “Been fighting with my sheets/ And nearly crying in my sleep.” Though the chorus spells out, cheerleader style, “D-A-N-G-E-R-O-U-S! A-N-I-M-A-L!” with references to “a most unsuitable pet” and the lip-licking “Let’s make a mess, lioness,” the plural of the title suggests that there’s more than one dangerous animal in the mix: “you” and “I” together. “And of course,” Turner adds, “the audience.” Of course! The audience! Wait, what?

“The audience/ Of frighteners and thieves/ Divided up into two teams,” Turner elaborates. “When the acrobat fell off the beam, she broke everyone’s heart.” You expect a different ending to that line– usually a physical fall breaks something other than a heart– and Turner’s lightning midline shift of focus emphasizes performance over body, show over substance, the voyeuristic gasps of an overinvested audience over gasps of genuine pain or pleasure. As Turner’s actual audience, we might again feel drawn into an uncomfortable kind of intimacy, watching him perform pleasure and pain, helplessness and yearning, for our obvious benefit.

With “Secret Door,” which features a “she” rather than a “you,” Turner shifts his gaze from head-on to sidelong, and the album sheathes its claws and enters a quieter kind of trance. The breathless, broken-hearted audience for the antics of the last song is now moodily described with “waiting eyes/ That you would rather be beside than in front of,” and the singer’s thoughts seem to turn to escape from the omnipresent frighteners and thieves, with a “she” who’s “never been the type to be hollowed by the stares…” Again he’s carried along more or less helplessly by the girl, led to a place where they haven’t so much escaped the audience as annihilated it; Turner, sleepwalking again, murmurs, “Even if they were to find us/ I wouldn’t notice/ I’m completely occupied.” The song is sweet and quietly atmospheric, but its wistfulness sometimes borders on petulance, and the ethereal sentiment of its imaginary rendezvous suffers by comparison with the stinging immediacy of the previous three tracks. Though the song features flashes of affectionate silliness that give us glimpses of the girl in question– “Her arms were folded most indignant/ Not looking like she was soon to leave”– most of the song is wispily generic and unsatisfying.

“Potion Approaching” tries to get back into the swing of things, focused with a protests-too-much insistency on “you” and, most definitely, only you: “The tide took me to your mouth and then swept me back down to your palms,” he sings. “Yours is the only ocean/ That I wanna swing from/ Yours is the only ocean/ That I wanna hang on to.” It’s a song of immersion, temporary escape– clearly, the secret door leads here– but the isolation is frenzied rather than idyllic, and a sharp awareness of its fragility lends the scene a needed edge. The deadpanned ending of the song:

Oh but if we’re gonna escape though,
We really ought to think it through,
Would you like me to build you a go-cart?

is Turner at his funniest.

After another wistfully slow-paced track, “Fire and the Thud” (which balances on the knife-edge between memories of the euphoric beginning of an affair and grief over its end), the album’s second single, “Cornerstone,” elaborates further on the vision of the stunned somnambulist, focused on an ex with a single-mindedness that borders on hallucination. “I thought I saw you in the…” begins each verse before naming yet another pub where a “lookalike” or “vision trick” seems amenable to his advances “till I asked her if I could call her your name.” At first this seems like the most hapless the singer has been yet– unlike the lazy, anticipatory craving in “My Propellor,” this loss is so absolute that, admitting “I’m beginning to think I imagined you all along,” the bereft lover huddles pathetically in the passenger’s seat of a car driven by someone else, taking solace in “your scent on the seatbelt” and in “elongating” the ride by failing to volunteer a possible shortcut.

The song ends, hilariously, with the effortless seduction of “your sister,” who agrees, after only a moment’s hesitation, “yes, you can call me anything you want.” It’s the singer’s daze that makes this funnier than it has any right to be; there’s no indication that he sees the seduction of his ex-girlfriend’s sister as an act of revenge or spite, and given that he’s been wandering around town kissing random girls who look like “you,” he now just seems mildly pleased to have discovered so close a resemblance in someone who will cooperate with his fantasy. It’s left to the listener to cackle over the elegant spite contained in this sentimental gesture; if anything will get the elusive “you” out of hiding, it will probably be this, but as in “Crying Lightning,” the ultimate approach to the throne seems all but unconscious.

Or is it? After the almost slapstick humor of “Cornerstone,” the album takes a sharp, disorienting turn; the “you” of “Dance Little Liar” is no object of desire, nor is it a frightening or thieving audience. The slow, enunciated drawl of Turner’s voice on this track, combined with a slight but ominous distortion, transform what could be read on the page as empathy into cold sadism, as Turner sings:

Just like those fibs to pop and fizz
And you’ll be forced to take that awful quiz
And you’re bound to trip
And she’ll detect the fiction on your lips
And dig a contradiction up

As always, the virtuosity of Turner’s lyrics is matched only by his perfect delivery; it’s impossible to convey in writing the delicate shifts in meter that pull expected iambs out from under the listener, or the slight caesurae that give equal emphasis to the words “forced” and “bound,” which, along with “not” in the next verse– the auditory play on “knot” has to be deliberate– suggest the strings of the puppet in the “dance” of the title. The refrain:

And the clean-coming will hurt
And you can never get it spotless
When there’s dirt beneath the dirt

draws out “clean” and “dirt” to the same degree, using caesurae again to annihilate the concept of “clean-coming” by revealing “dirt beneath the dirt” in phrasing mirrored perfectly as two palms pressed together.

(I need another cigarette.)

Though he can be exuberantly nasty at times, Turner rarely speaks of any “you” without at least some degree of mitigating affection (even when he shouted defiantly, on the group’s first album, “All you people are vampires!” the track was titled, “Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong But…”). But on “Dance Little Liar,” his usual incisive observation turns into something like vivisection, while the faint echo-chamber quality of the sound suggests a viciously thorough self-analysis. If the liar of the title is indeed Turner, or some persona of his, the song is all the more startling for the sometimes-cheerful, sometimes-zombielike extroversion of the album so far. If this is the sort of thing going on below that surface, no wonder this particular persona chases company so singlemindedly. “In all your time alone,” Turner demands, almost desperately, “can you hack your mind being riddled with the wrong memories?” Are those “wrong memories” the ones we’ve been seeing, an audience might wonder, or are these the popping and fizzing fibs we’ve been fed? How deeply are we, those frighteners and thieves, implicated in the necessity for these lies?

If “Dance Little Liar” was a 180-degree spin to stare into the narrator’s own terrified eyes, the next track, “Pretty Visitors,” is a headlong plunge into their depths; the lyrics here are a rapid-fire barrage of nonsensical, disconnected images, rife with the desperate frustrations of a complicated nightmare. The music has a jarring, carnival tone, and the lyrics hiss and click with tongue-twisters like:

What came first, the chicken or the dickhead?
Split sleep reaps rewards and ill-fitting thoughts
And twilight falls, she doesn’t wanna walk
Your legs start running and your leg gets caught

“You” here is fairly obviously the dreamer/singer himself, and one suspects that several previous “you”s from the first seven tracks make an appearance in the title as well as the nightmare’s refrain:

All the pretty visitors came and waved their arms
And cast the shadow of a snake pit on the wall

In this inner landscape, we are the visitors, and even the prettiest, most explicitly invited– magician, lioness, or potionmaker– can ultimately manifest only as part of a menacing shadowplay on the wall.

The title of the last track, “The Jeweller’s Hands,” suggests a delicacy of touch, and the music matches the expectation, backing off from the frenzied pace of “Pretty Visitors” to resume the slow, echo-edged distortion of “Dance Little Liar.” The first line, “Fiendish wonder in the carnival’s wake,” seems to refer to the style of the previous track, and the whisper of “Tread softly, stranger/ Move over towards the danger that you seek” draws in the listener with a startling directness, inviting a new intimacy with the mind through which we’ve been treading throughout the album. The next verse:

You think excitement has receded
And the mirror distracts
The logic of the trance
Quickly reaches and grasps
Handsome and faceless
And weightless your imagination runs

could serve as a commentary on the entire album so far, and indeed, as the song continues, the lyrics seem to wander, stranger in tow, back through the rest of the narrative. The landscape of the song is littered with talk of “old caresses,” of catching one’s own reflection, of carnivorous animals, of falling into dark water, and of “the last corner piece,” and the scene as a whole is fraught less with a sense of danger than with despair, along with the repeated assurance that “it’s no one’s fault but yours.” The edge of the singer’s voice is as chilling and pitiless in its analysis of “your” plight as it was on “Dance Little Liar.”

And, like “My Propellor,” “The Jeweller’s Hands” ends with a repeated expression of need. Although this time it’s a chant rather than a cry, seeking a “return” rather than an arrival, it feels no less urgent:

If you’ve a lesson to teach me, I’m listening
Ready to learn
There’s no one here to police me, I’m sinking in
Till your return
<BR>
If you’ve a lesson to teach me, don’t deviate
Don’t be afraid
Without the last corner piece, I can’t calibrate
Let’s get it ingrained

These two verses are repeated as steadily as a prayer or an incantation; as it fades, the song still begs for another pretty visitor. Whoever you are.