12:12 Tune of the Day: Crying Lightning — Arctic Monkeys
Posted By Ben W. on August 21, 2009
Writing and recording a highly anticipated comeback single is sticky business.
But listening to a highly anticipated comeback single is perhaps even stickier.
Absolute terror is more like it. Especially in this age of the two-year album cycle.
Consider that your favorite band is giving you maybe 12 songs to cherish every 24 months. Call it 16 songs if you’re really obsessed and chase down the B-sides. OK, so that new single had better live up to your expectations or else. Otherwise you’re staring down a long wait before you can renew those hopes. Or, even worse, one crap single can send your favorite band into a downward spiral that spins quickly from loss-of-momentum to loss-of-confidence to the complete-lack-of- relevancy stage. (Witness the career of Scottish rockers Idlewild.)
So hell yes I’m nervous listening to this new Arctic Monkeys single. They’re not my favorite band in the world, but I really liked their first two albums, and in the absence of any legitimately fresh sound coming out of England right now, they are what we’ve got. Alex Turner is a wonderful singer and an even better lyricist, helping make up for the band’s occasionally pedestrian music.
All right, I’m about to click “play” on YouTube. I figure this can go one of four ways here.
A) There’s the “Bombs Over Baghdad” scenario. This is where the advance single is not only completely mind-blowingly good in its own right, it’s also a harbinger of a classic forthcoming album. OutKast turned this trick three straight albums — first with “Elevators,” followed by “Rosa Parks,” and, yes, “Bombs Over Baghdad.” That’s an amazing run, because this doesn’t happen very often at all.
B) The second scenario is the Red Herring effect. The lead single is astoundingly awesome, but ultimately proves fools gold when it winds up being the only good song on the ensuing album. Case in point — this year’s White Rabbits (boring) album and its (misleadingly good) single “Percussion Gun.” This scenario can be the most heartbreaking of them all. Nothing worse than high hopes heightened and dashed.
C) “Don’t worry it might be like Kid A” is a far more pleasant scenario. This is when the lead single is undeniably underwhelming — see Radiohead’s advance cut for Kid A in 2000, “Optimistic.” But then the resulting album turns out to be wonderful — see the rest of Radiohead’s album Kid A. This is an important scenario to remember, as many albums work best as a unit and don’t lend themselves to individual highlights. And it’s always nice to hold out hope, yeah? Yeah.
D) The final scenario is the most difficult to stomach — the doomsday scenario — and unfortunately it happens far too often for my taste. In this case, the lead single is awful and the parent album is only awful-er. There’s no red herring; there’s no Kid A. There’s only the sad realization that your favorite band has just dropped a real stinker. And the band — to say nothing of the poor listener — may never be the same.
All of which brings us to today’s 12:12 Tuner, “Crying Lightning.” Where does it fit? What scenario applies?
Well of course I haven’t yet heard Humbug, the forthcoming Arctics’ album, so I can’t say for sure. But let’s say I’m hoping for option C — the “Don’t worry it might be like Kid A” scenario — at this point.
The song just doesn’t grab me like their previous work. Turner has continued his shift from literal lyric to more obtuse poetic verse that we first saw on last year’s Last Shadow Puppets record. He still has a gift for gab, spitting out phrases and visuals (“With folded arms you occupied the bench like toothache; Stood and puffed your chest out like you’ve never lost a war”) that sparkle in the imagination, but fail to connect as a coherent story anymore. I mean, hell, he’s still probably the best 23-year-old wordsmith in the biz. It’s just that, personally, I preferred his more journalistic style on their earlier work to this new-wave-Jim-Morrison act.
The band again employs the spy-movie, noir-guitar effect that they used so well on their sophomore album, Your Favourite Worst Nightmare. This time, though, they’ve slowed the tempo from amphetamine romp to militant stomp. This song often feels more like a death march than a hit single. And that’s cool. They’ve certainly got a more sexual and menacing swagger about them than ever before.
But I fear Josh Homme’s production influence isn’t helping matters. The band recorded much of its new album in the Queens Of The Stone Age frontman’s desert studio, and it shows in this song. It just has a little too much of that heavy American alt-rock mainstream crunch to it for my liking. When the chorus kicks in and we get the soaring vocal melody that doesn’t lay claim to having an actual melody, and the revved-up guitars crashing, and the dumbed-down, brain-bashing drums pounding all around us, you wonder if you’ve accidentally set the time machine controls for “August, 1997; H.O.R.D.E. Fest.” And trust me, that is not the kind of accident you want to make in a time machine.
I was hoping they would expand upon the lineage of Scott Walker, The Jam, The Smiths, and even The Coral that they seemed to be following. Alas, “Crying Lightning” opts more for The Doors, QOTSA and Foo Fighters. Not my cup, friends. Not my cup.
But hey, I hear the album is pretty good; a strange, twisted, weird grower of a record that doesn’t necessarily have a dominant single. We shall see.
It might be like Kid A, right?
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And what do YOU think of it?
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this song makes me miss “Fluorescent Adolescent,” that was a great song!