Arctic Monkeys AM Album

The Arctic Monkeys are back with their 5 lp AM which you can hear stream at Itunes
https://itunes.apple.com/ie/artist/arctic-monkeys/id62820413?affId=1988966&ign-mpt=uo=4
listened to it few times now love it, they just get better and better,

 

Sounds promising! Love the way they evolved over their first three albums, especially like "Humbug". Never heard "Suck It" though. Oh... and The Last Shadow Puppets were also great.

 

Arctic Monkeys are vital. I'm not saying they're the best band going but they're better than your favorite band touring today. New album is very strong. To the post above, don't hesitate on Suck it and See, it's got amazing songwriting and holds up against anything they've done. I've seen these guys live so many times, in so many venues it's crazy. Theirs is a proper evolution.

 

I turned off of these guys due to all the hype from the UK mags when their first LP came out as I found it to be a bit underwhelming, but I've now caught up with all of their releases and am eagerly awaiting the new album. They do seem to be getting better and better...

 

to my hears the "suck it and see " album is their best, well worth getting but I am loving the new AM lp

 

My vinyl copy is in route from Germany along with some of their back catalog that I was missing. I really enjoyed the last lp and have the first but I like the last lp better. Looking forward to this one!

 

I thought this would be another album with no discussion whatsoever in the forum. Glad to see someone opening a thread about it.
There is an increasing number of albums that I enjoy but apparently go totally below the radar on the SHF.
Just to name a few:
- Sigur Ros: Kveikur (thread dead after a few posts)
- Travis: Where You Stand (same)
- Glasvegas: Later, When The TV Turns To Static (I haven't seen a thread at all)
- Franz Ferdinand: new album (thread already dead)
- Joseph Arthur: The Ballad Of Boogie Christ (I think I started the thread but it's already dead)
- Okkervil River: The Silver Gymnasium (thread barely started and already dying - not one comment on the actual album, even if it has been reviewed extensively... even the NYT had an article)
- Arctic Monkey: AM (I expect this thread too to die in its infancy)
- Babyshambles: new album (no thread)

 

I'm looking forward to this album. As others have noted, each album has progressively gotten better, and I loved their debut too.

EDIT: Oh, and thanks for the head's up on the new Babyshambles. I did not know that was happening. Is it seriously only available as an "import" on Amazon for $24.99?

 

The last thread for Suck It & See had a decent life span but you are correct. Some may open the thread thinking they discovered some frozen archives for "The Monkees."

I'm a big Sigur Ros fan and this just reminded me to look up tix for a local show this fall. It's been at least 6 years since they played my city. Admittedly, I kind of fell off the radar after the last few.

 

Any reports on the SQ of the vinyl release?

 

If I was to go by the others I'd say it's pretty good but nothing amazing. It usually suits the music well. I'm pretty sure SIAS was cut from a separate vinyl master (to my ears). Cut by Ray Janos!

 

The "limited" deluxe vinyl looks nice. Apparently there is also a standart edition without 7", huge booklet & gatefold. I might buy this deluxe thing

With "Suck It And See" I simply missed the moment when it came out. Buying it later wasn't so tempting because it was easy and cheap to get. Stupid I know

 

just got the limited deluxe , very nice flat vinyl sounds great to my eyes , the 7" is in plain black sleeve, the booklet is only 8 pages, 12"x 12" size, nice package but over priced here at e32.99

 

Add Valerie June to your list - thread is dead in the water

 

What else do you expect from a message board obsessed with what strings John used on his Rickenbacker in 1963 or whatever Monkees/Beatles album everyone's heard 103823783 times before?

 

All you can do is keep the posts up, others will soon follow. I do think it would be a good thing for the SHF to have at least one 24 hour banned on Beatles and Monkees posts (no Beatles no Monkees day). This is coming fom the guy called paulisdead - listening an talking about the SAME band over and over again will drive you mental.

 

10 to 10 review on NME!!!!

http://www.nme.com/reviews/arctic-monkeys/14752

Review

Arctic Monkeys’ fifth record is absolutely and unarguably the most incredible album of their career. It might also be the greatest record of the last decade. It’s not, however, the work of a band operating at their absolute peak – that’s yet to come. It’s the work of a band still growing, still fine-tuning, still learning and still experimenting; a band who will not look back on this record as a career high, but as the moment they stopped being defined by genre and instead became artists. Not a rock band, definitely not an indie band, but artists. Think Bowie, think The Beatles, think Stevie Wonder and think Bob Dylan. From this point on, Arctic Monkeys can do whatever they want, sound however they like, and always be Arctic Monkeys. But that’s all for another day, sometime in their stupidly bright future. For now, we should celebrate this record for what it is – 41 minutes and 57 seconds of near perfection.

Let’s begin with the details. Twelve tracks, recorded at Sage & Sound Recording in Los Angeles and Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree, California, featuring guest appearances from Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme, Elvis Costello’s drummer Pete Thomas and ex-Coral man Bill Ryder-Jones. It was produced by James Ford and co-produced by Ross Orton, with mixing from Tchad Blake, who worked on The Black Keys’ 2010 breakthrough album, ‘Brothers’. It’s a record about sex, lust, frustration and isolation, and about getting really, really high. As you will have already read in NME, it’s a total West Coast record that’s as much late-’90s hip-hop in sound as it is mid-’70s rock. And the lyrics… oh, maaaan. At times they sound like they were written by a man with a burning hard-on who wants – or rather needs – to savagely **** your body, mind and soul.

That man, of course, is Alex Turner, one of only a handful of musicians dead or alive that it’s not completely ludicrous to describe as an actual genius. On ‘AM’ – as he has been for the past 18 months or so – he’s channelling the spirit of another one of that select bunch, John Lennon. And we’re not just talking about the Hamburg quiff here. Throughout the record, you can’t get away from Lennon’s presence, never more so than on ‘Arabella’, the cornerstone of the album, where Dre collides into Sabbath with the elegance of a horny drunk on a lost weekend. Alex’s wordplay echoes the surrealism of ‘I Am The Walrus’ or ‘Come Together’, announcing that “Arabella’s got some interstellagator skin boots/And a helter-skelter around her little finger and I ride it endlessly” before slamming into a vocal delivery lifted straight from the chorus of Lennon’s 1975 Old Grey Whistle Test recording of ‘Stand By Me’. In keeping with the influences of the record, there’s a whiff of Eminem in the way he rolls his elongated sentences across a few lines of melody, finding rhymes in the middle of lines where less gifted songwriters wouldn’t even think to look. Speaking about Lennon to NME last year, Alex explained how difficult he found trying to write in such a way: “It’s all a jumble, but it’s not just that. It paints you a picture and puts you in this place. He’s got a way of leading you somewhere with these unusual words that don’t make sense, but also make perfect ****ing sense.” Right here, he’s nailed it. Unsurprisingly, they’re Alex’s favourite lyrics on the album. But they’re not the best.

For those, take your pick of the opening lines to ‘Do I Wanna Know?’, the slow-grinding juggernaut of handclaps, feet stomps and that Jamie Cook riff that kicks off the whole record (“Have you got colour in your cheeks/Do You ever get the fear that you can’t shift/The type that sticks around like something in your teeth?”), the sexed-up chorus of the R&B-influenced ‘One For The Road’ (“So we all go back to yours and you sit and talk to me on the floor/There’s no need to show me round, baby, I feel like I’ve been here before”), or the heart-stopping beauty of ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ (“I wanna be your vacuum cleaner/Breathing in your dust/I wanna be your Ford Cortina/I will never rust”). The latter’s lyrics are lifted straight from a John Cooper Clarke poem with slight tweaks and an added chorus. It’s the last track on the record and highlights the confidence that Alex is now writing with, where he can leave you with a feeling that he’s saying, “Yeah, I’m good, but check this guy out.” It only adds to the sense that the best is yet to come from this band.
In-between ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ and ‘I Wanna Be Yours’, the record bristles with that same confidence and depth. You already know ‘R U Mine?’, the song whose sound informed the entire writing and recording process and introduced the world to The Cosmic Opera Melodies Of The Space Choirboys (namely Matt Helders and Nick O’Malley doing their best falsettos), and ‘Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?’, where Helders’ drums have never sounded so hip-hop as they beat out the rhythm to Alex’s pissed-up booty call. As for the rest, ‘I Want It All’ is a pure glam-rock stomp, ‘No 1 Party Anthem’ could have been lifted straight from Alex Turner’s own Submarine soundtrack or Lennon’s ‘Double Fantasy’, ‘Mad Sounds’ pitches somewhere between a sleazy Lou Reed slowie and a Primal Scream ballad, ‘Fireside’ (featuring Bill Ryder-Jones) gallops along on a mariachi rhythm, dragging the desert influence back into the city, and ‘Snap Out Of It’ swirls with such orchestral intensity that it wouldn’t feel out of place on a second Last Shadow Puppets album.

If Arctic Monkeys had never walked into the desert with Josh Homme to record ‘Humbug’ in 2009, they could never have made ‘AM’. ‘Humbug’ was as much about subverting people’s impressions of who the band were as it was an album in its own right. It was a shedding of the skin, a descending of the bollocks, where riffs became heavy and boys became men. But most importantly it condemned the first incarnation of Arctic Monkeys – the bright-eyed teenage know-it-alls with hits tumbling out of their trackie bottoms pockets – to a shallow grave in the sand. ‘Humbug’ was the first evolution of the Monkeys, ‘AM’ is the second, which in a completely ****ed-up way makes 2011’s masterpiece ‘Suck It And See’ the most insignificant record in the band’s history.

Homme’s presence is most prominently felt on ‘Knee Socks’, where he repays the favour for Alex’s involvement in the most recent Queens Of The Stone Age record by adding a haunting, agonised howl to a Destiny’s Child-style breakdown that flips Merry Clayton’s ‘Gimme Shelter’ vocal on its head. It’s a fitting, heavyweight contribution from the man who many originally thought had destroyed the Arctic Monkeys with his influence, but who history will remember as the man who helped turn them into gods.

So yes, look at the score, listen to the record, and bask in the glory of knowing that while this may be chapter five of the complete history, it’s the first act of the real golden age.

Mike Williams

 

There's an unboxing of the deluxe version on YouTube

 

Oh la la! Think I will get this rather sooner than later!

 

With a a 20% discount I ended up getting mine for 16.80 Euros from jpc.de. It is typically $34.99 at most U.S. online retailers. I ordered quite a few other things to offset the shipping charges so it made since. Strange to order from EU maybe but they had some desired pressings from Music on Vinyl that I wanted as well and could get much cheaper than in the U.S.

 

Looking forward to getting this--one of my favorite current bands. Great sound, great songs.

 

Some epic music videos coming out of this album too.

 

No, not the greatest album of the last decade, unless they're considering 2010-2013.

Best album of their career? I'd have to agree with that, but my perception is skewed because the only album I liked by them was 'Suck It and See' so that might tell you what type of music style I'm prejudiced to.

I'm going to listen to this again today as I've only listened to it once. But I was really impressed.