Last Shadow Puppets
The Age Of the Understatement
[xl recordings]
If I were an Arctic Monkey I’d be a bit miffed with Alex Turner. The talented bugger has been a secretive git, keeping all his best tunes for a side project while feeding his band on the peanut husk tunes that comprised most of their second album Favourite Worst Nightmare. It’s great to see a pop star being so prolific though, brings me back to the sixties it does, and with his compadre, The Rascals lead singer Miles Kane, (who played guitar on FWN track 505) Turner copper fastens his standing as one of, if not the, brightest lights of the contemporary British pop scene. Taking their sonic template from Deram/Anthony Newley period David Bowie (their title track lead single is backed with a cover of Bowie’s epic In The Heat Of The Morning), the melancholic kitchen sink dramas of The Walker Brothers and the spaghetti western moods of sixties L.A psychedelic folk rockers Love, Turner and Kane have fashioned an unfashionable album that is so fashionably right for these times. It’s a sixties seam that hardly gets an airing and the fact that they have so successfully tapped into its inner zeitgeist is bound to garner them oodles of kudos, especially among the new breed of kids who are rediscovering the links between music, fashion and lifestyle. Turner would never be so pretentious to admit to influencing anyone in the fashion stakes but his brand of social realism will always strike a chord with kids who see dressing up as an escape from humdrum existences. The songwriting is uniformly excellent throughout; killer choruses, epic strings (courtesy of the London Metropolitan Orchestra), top notch arrangements that sweep the tunes along with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of potential realized. If this album was released in 1967 – generally thought to be the strongest ever year for classic albums – it would have been hailed as a great record. Forty-one years later it’s a contender for album of the year.
