Revisiting the Arctic Monkeys at their Very Best: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (TBHC) is a glittering, glowing, living album. But It’s not just an album: it’s a thought. It’s an idea. It is four middle-aged men from Sheffield twisting the air and its vibrations with various tools and instruments in a way that somehow begins with four chords on a piano and ends with questioning the very reality we live in. It’s a lifestyle, a flavor, a color, an imagination. It is a story, and it tells that story in the same way all songs tell their stories: through lyrics, through instruments, through its sound, through its premise, and through the way it is performed, with so much commitment and passion that it does not feel like an album that is simply an album; it feels like both a reflection and a premonition. It is a reminder of our past, a lens through which to view the present, and a telescope towards the future of our relationship with space, with the universe and the stars and how we exist amongst them, explorers, adventurers, colonizers, and most of all, artists.
The first song of an album sets the tone for the next forty minutes of your life and your listening. Just as a proposition introduces the point of an essay, an opening song introduces the point of an album: its tone, its statement, and everything it is trying to convince you of. Star Treatment does this tremendously; it drops you into TBHC like you were never anywhere else at all. This sets it apart from other songs that lean into the science fiction genre.
Fans of David Bowie may be ready to compare the album to Space Oddity, but there is a stark difference: Space Oddity, incredible song that it is, treats the theme of the song as the point of the song. The point of Space Oddity is that it is set largely in space. Star Treatment treats the science fiction genre as a backdrop; as a world to build upon, to treat as our own for the duration of listening. It is melancholic, hopeful, ambitious, and deprecating all at once. Alex Turner, the lead singer, lyricist (and on this album, pianist) for the band, creates a reality where you are no longer just who you are; you are who you can be. You are you, if you had everything your heart desired.
Hearing it is almost overwhelming. It is like seeing the scenarios you used to imagine for yourself when you laid in bed at night at twelve years old broadcast in cinemascope for the entire world to see. Your zany dreams have been stolen from your middle school subconscious mind and somehow translated to a six minute futuristic glam rock style song where you, personally, are a rockstar on the moon, completing what the lyrics themselves term a “make-believe residency” for inhabitants from every corner of the universe to experience.
The piano is dreamy, and almost jazz-reminiscent in its discordance and resolutions, and the lyrics evoke fully-fledged images of glitter and stars and martinis and history and future. Just as Buzz Aldrin felt “buoyant and full of goose pimples when I stepped down on the surface [of the moon]” at Tranquility Base, the landing base for the Apollo 11 mission, the Arctic Monkeys evoke a sense of buoyancy and anticipation in their own fictional depiction of Tranquility Base throughout the song with its dreamy vocals and futuristic-feeling production.
It is true that this album garnered nowhere near the fame of their previous album AM’s more palatable radio hits. Though TBHC did receive a nod at the 2019 Grammy awards with nominations for Best Alternative Album and Best Rock Performance for a song on TBHC, Four Out Of Five, AM is still by far the more famous and recognized album by them, both by the general public and even Arctic Monkeys fans. The music on this album is different from some of the Arctic Monkeys’ previous discography as it does not adhere cleanly to a single genre, to conventional rock, to clean hooks, clear rhythms, and catchy bridges. Each song is its own ecosystem in the larger biosphere of the album, growing from warped notes and tones and one word or one idea inspirations to something that is a journey, through genre and through space all at once.
While all of the Arctic Monkeys make a significant contribution to the sound and execution of the album, with Matt Helders’ drum and percussion keeping the experimentality of each song together, Jamie Cook’s guitar creating a sense of movement in the album, and Nick O’Malley’s bass guitar grounding all the other instruments into something tangible, it is clear that Alex Turner is the driving force behind the creation of this album. Every lyric on this album is so different from each other that it is incredibly easy to see all the different places from which he drew inspiration. Throughout the album there are lines inspired by books, lines inspired by movies, multiple lines inspired by other artists and songs, by politics, by emotions, by technology.
This interaction Turner has with pop culture and the world around him in the music contributes to how full not only the album, but each lyric feels. It is this deep well of culture and ideas that allows the album to go from talking about gentrification on the moon — ”Cute new places keep on popping up/Around Clavius, it’s all getting gentrified/I put a taqueria on the moon (The information action ratio)/It got rave reviews/Four stars out of five” (from Four Stars Out Of Five) — to meta commentary about our addiction to our phones — ”I want an interesting synonym/To describe this thing/That you say we’re all grandfathered in/I’ll use the search engine” (from Batphone).
This idea is incredibly artistic, and while it makes for an incredibly intellectual and imaginative album, it does not create an artistic product that is as easily broken down, chewed up, and spit out in simple marketing to fans and wider audiences alike. This album is not a stock album, one of those albums with disjointed songs stuck together and presented as a cohesive piece, while really only very vague theming ties it together as a full work of art. It is a complete thing, alive, beating raw in your hands like a heart. When you listen, you are more than yourself: you are more than just a girl, or a boy, or something in between, and you are more than a worker, a base contributor to society, a slave to the capitalist machine. This album transports you to a place where you become a figment of yourself, alone amongst the stars, asking questions of faith, humanity, creation and how we got to this place where we are so desperate to escape from our own realities. TBHC creates this parallel reality between your diminutive, measly, boring, human life on Earth and the life you get to live of fame, glamor, future, and sweet, sweet music in another life. The ultramodern synth pounds in the back of your skull until you let it infuse into your bloodstream, coursing through your body like a drug.
Though I may be tempted to give the album “four stars out of five” as a nod to the same lyrics of the album, the musical variety and imagery in this album leave me no possible choice but to award it five stars. It is undoubtedly the Arctic Monkeys most experimental album, and is perhaps one of the greatest science fiction albums in all of music, simply in its commitment to that theme and how it is portrayed in more than just lyrics. The space pop genre and the otherworldly aspects of the music come through in everything from the lyrics to the vocals themselves, to the instrumentation, and to the order of the album, and how it actively feels like we are moving through space and time as we are listening. TBHC both functions as a time capsule for 2018 and our current yearning for escapist media, and an eternal depiction of the human need for more, the aspiration for something beyond our world.
It is aspirations like these that drive humans to such rapid technological advancements, never stopping to consider the societal consequences of those advancements being too rapid, and this is a large part of what Turner talks about through creating this fictional world whose problems mirror ours so clearly. The key question that Turner and the Arctic Monkeys seem to pose with this album is whether those who are so focused on technology and creating things that are bigger, brighter, and better than before and can take us to higher places, higher planes, have ever stopped to consider that problems that exist in our current reality will continue to exist in any society, any reality, any world that they create? These problems exist on Earth, they exist at the fictional Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, and they will exist in any colony that is created on Mars.
When did putting a man in space turn into walking on the moon turn into space tourism for the ultra-rich and how soon is it until the glimmering depiction of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino becomes no longer just a depiction at all, but an instruction manual? Whenever that may be, and I have no doubt that it will be, the Arctic Monkeys and this album will be there to soundtrack the occasion with futuristic space rock that is no longer futuristic space rock at all; it will simply be rock.