Seized, we are, from the first bars of the magnificent There’d Better Be a Mirrorball at the opening of The Car of Arctic Monkeys: this atmosphere brought by the jazz cymbal, the violins which will accompany the orchestra throughout this seventh album, this dramatic theme as we will recognize others through the other nine songs, and the voice of Alex Turner, transformed into croon existentialist dissecting love, rock star life (Big Ideas) and fame. What an atmosphere, what a gap today separates Arctic Monkeys from the rock outpourings of their first albums! There are, in this revolutionary album, flashes of the most tragic of the work of the Carpenters (Super starfor example), from the more circumspect of Curtis Mayfield when the group ventures towards soul/funk on I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am and Jet Skis on the Moat. And texts to which we will linger all the more as the music invites us to do so: Turner has an extremely elegant pen, his rich images, although sometimes unfathomable, reminiscent of the prose of a Dan Bejar (Destroyer), but more calculated.
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