Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (2018), Arctic Monkeys
Three vodka tonics deep into the hotel bar and you really should be getting back to your room before something stupid happens. There’s a deal-closing sales presentation you have to speak to tomorrow morning, but a low whisper that sounds miles away yet oh-so-close destroys your common-senses; following the voice through a trail of smoke that twists and turns through hallways decorated with once elegant, white wallpaper now jaundiced with tobacco stains; you enter a dimly-lit backroom where everything coalesces: the whisper was actually the smooth-talking-baritone of the enigmatic frontman of the hotel’s four-piece house band, Arctic Monkeys; a thin young man with slicked-back chocolate hair accented by a thin goatee-mustache-combo, yellow-tinted glasses, and a cheap white sports jacket draped last-minute over a black t-shirt and some blue-jeans. The frontman leans forward into the microphone above an ancient Steinway piano, a moody melody drifts through smoky fog before starting on his signature seductive croon, “I’m a big name in deep space, ask your mates.”
You glance at your watch: it’s 23:31:47 – Moon time. Then suddenly, you remember where you are: that once all-important sales presentation now melting away into the red polymeric foam that you melted into just moments ago. With a flick of the wrist, you order another vodka tonic and slide a pack of cheap cigarettes out of the left pocket of your black khakis; the match takes three strikes before you add some smoke of your own into the room. The music pauses, giving you a chance to flirt a glance at the massive blue marble looking down at you through the nearby window, interrupted by the groove of a lone bassline as the scrappy frontman tosses his white jacket onto the piano behind him, steps up to the standing microphone, and says, “This next one’s called Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino.”
Alex Turner, frontman and principal songwriter of Arctic Monkeys, pictured during the 2018 Maida Vale BBC sessions
This is “Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.” A loose concept album following the house band of a luxury four-out-of-five-star resort on the Moon, a hotel-casino erected and named after the location of Apollo 11’s 1969 Moon landing; Neil Armstrong proclaimed, at 20:17:58 – Moon time, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
The Eagle has, indeed, landed.
“Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino” is Ziggy Stardust sung by the millennial equivalent of Bryan Ferry, which amounts to Arctic Monkeys’ crowning achievement: their masterwork. Entirely written by Alex Turner, frontman and principal songwriter, on a gifted Steinway Vertegrand piano after feeling stuck with guitar music following the overwhelming success of their previous album, “AM”; the result is a saturnine jazzy-mood-piece driven by piano melodies supported by subdued but incredibly funky basslines and a light seasoning of electric guitar that manages to capture all the contradictions: introspective and arrogant, modern and retro, lounge and rock ‘n’ roll, very stupid and incredibly intelligent.
Like every great album, “Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino” transports you to a location in time and space; this place happens to be the science-fiction in Alex Turner’s head: a scenic space resort with a seedy underbelly – and we will be covering a sampling of what this resort has to offer.
“I liked the idea of naming the album after a place, because to me records that I’ve been in love with and continue to be in love with feel like they’re places that you can go for a while.” –Alex Turner, Billboard, 2018
Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino is a resort you’ll want to stay checked into for a long while.
‘Star Treatment’ starts the record with the strike of a single piano key and a big-band drum roll, signifying something different is going on with the Monkeys. Moony synths and forlorn “oohs” and “aahs” sprinkled throughout, and not a single rhythm guitar in earshot before Alex Turner’s baritone comes in at the forefront of the mix, as if he’s singing only to you in an empty bar. “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes,” he sings, kicking off the self-deprecation hiding underneath the glossy science-fiction surface that also serves as an introduction to the fading frontman of the Tranquility Base house band; this fading frontman could easily be Alex Turner twenty years after the writing of this record, a washed-up version of himself that might say something like, “What do you mean you’ve never seen Blade Runner?” — a movie older than Turner himself.
In what might be the second-funkiest bassline on any Arctic Monkeys’ record to date, ‘One Point Perspective’ serves as the drunken aftermath following a night of lounge singing, as our faded frontman retires to his penthouse suite in a stupor, singing to only himself in the mirror and … “Bear with me, man, I lost my train of thought,” he sing-says before a perfectly timed pause, gathering his thought-train into another drunken karaoke; “Dancing in my underpants, I’m going to run for government,” crooning his take on Earth’s politics before hinting at the planet’s fate with mentions of “shining cities on the fritz” and a man-made apocalypse that “finally gets prioritized.” The frontman — at this point impossible to distinguish the real one from the fake one — then shifts into an impressive nostalgic falsetto, reminiscing about listening to the soundtrack of his favorite documentary while driving on Earth’s motorways before ultimately questioning if it was all just in his imagination.
Both ‘Star Treatment’ and ‘One Point Perspective’ combine into the title track ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino,’ an epic poem told through the narration of the hotel’s receptionist, Mark, who details the unique and oftentimes very strange guests he has to deal with, from hot tub lounge lizards who think they’re Jesus Christ, to wannabe-folk-hero Moms late to their protest songs after getting expensive salon treatments, and finally the lowlife mafioso trying to cop a feel of every young woman in the casino: “Pull me in close on a crisp eve, baby; kiss me underneath the Moon’s side boob.”
Video: Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino
Mark sees it all and tells us all about it to the backdrop of the funkiest bassline on the record and a shimmering piano melody before reaching the sinister bridge that mirrors the dark underworld of the Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino; a place where the rich gather, literally floating above it all, and pretend to be tuned into the suffer-frequencies of those still on Earth all the while participating in the never-ending sexual deviance that humanity can’t seem to shake, regardless of how resplendent the venue happens to be.
The last song we’ll cover is ‘Four Out Of Five,’ the first single released for the record. ‘Four Out Of Five’ functions as the marketing pitch for both the literal and fictional “Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.” In the literal sense, it is an accessible pop song with a catchy sing-along chorus and elements reminiscent of the older Arctic Monkeys style filtered through a Post-Bowie-Glam-Rock amplifier; a bright light of pop music meant to draw in the figurative moths. In the fictional sense, it serves as an advertisement of the Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino directly from the mouth of its creator, who acts as the narrator for this five-minute science fiction marketing pitch for the resort he toiled so tirelessly to create.
“Take it easy for a little while; come and stay with us, it's such an easy flight; cute new places keep on popping up; since the exodus, it's all getting gentrified; I put a taqueria on the roof, it was well reviewed: four stars out of five, and that's unheard of.” –Arctic Monkeys. “Four Out of Five.” Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. 2018.
‘Four Out Of Five’ paints a vivid picture of the fictional Moon world that we, in the real world, can only visit for 40 minutes at a time; a microcosm of the album’s overall setting. It introduces one of its core themes: distractions, particularly technological distractions. This theme borders on full-blown technophobia, referencing social media and virtual realities that disconnect us from real-human-contact and lead to real-human-sadness.
Taking the digital criticism even further, ‘Four Out Of Five’ draws from Neil Postman’s concept of the ‘information-action ratio’ both by name-dropping it as a location ‘around Clavius’ (one of the largest craters on the Moon) and conceptually; this concept examines the actions people take upon receiving information and how we have been oversaturated with trivialized, contradictory, and sometimes pointless information to the point where we now partake in stupid-action-at-a-distance; in this way, the world of Tranquility Base is a lot like our own, more akin to “Brave New World” than “1984.” It’s a world where stupid-information-overload makes us forget about all the Bad Stuff going on and focus only on all the Stupid Stuff going on instead; ignoring the impending ‘meteor strike’ mentioned only in passing by Tranquility Base’s marketing director as a perk of visiting the Moon resort: “Look, you could meet someone you like during the meteor strike, it is that easy.”
After all, why should we care about a meteor strike on Earth if we’re in a hot tub on the Moon?
“Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino” warns of the dangers of technological distractions but also functions as one of those very same distractions; because nothing really matters when Bryan Ferry for the millennial age sings the 40-minute long sequel to David Bowie’s ‘Five Years’ directly into my ear while it’s late at night and I’m all alone surrounded by twelve screens of blinding blue light.
