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9. Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino - Arctic Monkeys (2018)
Lounge Pop
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is the most colossal statement to date from a band that’s made a habit of making colossal statements. 2013’s AM (#30 on this list) was certainly that; a largely guitar-forward pop record that, while still being sharp and witty, traded much of the sleaziness that flavored earlier works for a slick maturity that actually read much “cooler” than anything they’d done before. As the story goes, Alex Turner received a Steinway & Sons piano as a 30th birthday present in 2016. Citing a diminishing ability to glean new material or ideas from his guitar, Turner turned his attention to the piano and began crafting what would eventually become Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.
The album is everything a concept album should be. While it doesn’t overtly relate one grand, sprawling narrative (though I believe it does this too), it creates an elaborate world in which a number of smaller vignettes occur. The inter-relatedness of these vignettes, aside from their setting, is largely dependent on whether you perceive multiple narrators throughout the album or a lone(ly) narrator. Turner himself has alluded to the fact that there are, in fact, multiple narrators heard from throughout, but I’m a bit more partial to a more subversive, “The Shining on the Moon” interpretation.
It’s certainly possible that the intended takeaway from a narrative standpoint is that there are a number of vacationers and/or long-term tenants all coexisting at the Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino on the Moon, and that we hear from a number of them, primarily in the form of conversational monologue. There are plenty of insinuations that these narrators aren’t alone, most obviously the fact that their manner of speaking often implies an audience of at least one, but there’s no real proof. If the intention was to create the impression that a variety of voices were being heard from, then the execution of delineating between the voices was not executed well at all, as there is really only one “voice” (in terms of manner of speaking) that’s heard from throughout the album. Given the obviously high-brow and intellectually ambitious strivings of the rest of the project, the odds that Turner and the rest of the band would have overlooked this seem unlikely.
This leaves the even more fun interpretation that the entire album is the narrative product of one lone remaining occupant of the Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, who, given his distance from Earth and the presumed absence of company on the moon, has gone full Jack Torrance (though not being murderous, yet, at least). He is depicted imagining acquaintances, vacationers and hotel staff, engaging with them conversationally, but completely oblivious to them being nothing but a product of his own space- and isolation-induced madness. On “Four Out Of Five”, this narrator refers to “the exodus”, implying there were once others with him at the hotel and now there aren’t, or at least there are way fewer. This, while imploring someone, presumably still on Earth, to come join him to allay his loneliness. The brilliant imagery of “I lost the money, lost the keys, but I’m still handcuffed to the briefcase” on “American Sports” is a poetically astounding allusion to going nuts, in this case the still being handcuffed to the briefcase implying that he’s stuck in a situation that was once important but is now completely devoid of meaning.
One of the most telling tracks on the album, “The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip”, seems to depict the narrator’s genuine interaction with some sort of computer system, robot or android that is able to present to him home videos from his time on Earth. The narrator bemoans his inability to explain complex concepts from home (ie. the intricacies of human love) to a computer, while the computer tries to feign understanding. This computer is apparently programmed to love the narrator, and it assumes a character it thinks will seduce the man. “I’m just a bad girl trying to be good” it explains. “I’ve got a laser guiding my love that I can’t adjust”. An earlier reference to the sci-fi classic “Blade Runner”, in which human-android interaction is a major thread, contextualizes the otherwise strange, sad scene.
Repeated references to the Batman canon imply a perceived kinship with the Caped Crusader born out of the hermitude that a life dedicated to anonymous heroism necessitates. This hints at the possible reason for the narrator’s being at the TBHAC to begin with. On the other hand, it could be just another symptom of a pathologically afflicted mind, wracked with loneliness and prone to delusions of grandeur and departures from reality.
The album’s ability to convey a sense of intense isolation is perhaps its most impressive achievement. The drastic shift away from the rock and pop conventionality the band embraced on earlier albums and the whole-hearted dive into the lounge aesthetic works in a number of ways. The sound itself isolates the listener in a place that feels foreign, especially in relation to the rest of the band’s catalog. Everything feels physically far off and echoey, conveying distance and implying the vacuum of space in between. In a temporal sense, the lounge aesthetic conjures images of a social atmosphere long-since forgotten, thus furthering the disconnect between what the album delivers and what the listener is accustomed to ingesting.
From a lyrical perspective, Turner is at his finest. Always keeping things from becoming “too clever for their own good”, which he prescribes as the downfall of some overly ambitious “Science Fiction” stories, there is a wittiness that pervades every track. The sense of humor is lofty, unconcerned with whether it lands consistently with everyone or not. The quintessential coolness I alluded to when discussing AM is here in spades, though of course wearing a much different outfit. That ability to convey the same degree of unquestionable swagger using a completely different set of tools is a mark of the band’s true greatness. It’s hard to imagine where Arctic Monkeys might go from here, but whatever it ends up being, Turner & Co. have given us no reason to doubt it will be anything short of brilliant.
*image; cover art for the album Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino by Arctic Monkeys