BlogClan Tavern

Not sure if I’m the only Arctic Monkeys fan around here, but… okay, AHEM. Their album, AM, from 2013 landed on Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums of all time. It was a real groovy rock n’ roll record and had everybody vibing. THEN, five years later, they dropped a new record that had a totally subversive sound. It was not at all rock n’ roll, but more lounge/jazz-like, space age pop. I LOVE LOVE LOVE SciFi so much, particularly the pulp/golden-age type. This record is the exact embodiment of that time, with their guitars somehow emulating perfectly the sounds of robots and the cosmos. The concept is that in the not far future, the earth becomes overpopulated and chaotic, so many people are heading to live on the moon. The setting of the album in particular is a hotel on the moon called the Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino (any smarty pants out there recognize where Tranquility Base is from in actual history?) Each song is a short story of sorts from the perspective of different people staying at the hotel, and there’s much darker things going on in each of their lives beneath all the glamour. The record also tackles the idea of us being consumed by technology and social media, and how’s that’s impacting our ability to socialize in real life. The “information-action ratio” is a term used in it, to refer to how we have almost limitless information available at our fingertips, but the inability to use all of it to our benefit. The album got glowing reviews but was sadly criticized by most fans of their previous works, since it was much slower in sound and cryptic in lyrics. But it is in my top three favorite albums of all time. If you’d like to give it a listen, try Four Stars Out of Five, which is essentially an advertisement song inviting you to the hotel! 😄 I could literally break down in deep detail each lyric off this album; I’ve soaked it in so much. I’m such a geek. I also love their following record, the Car, but that’s for another time.