Album Review of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino – Arctic Monkeys

BY NEAL MARTIN | JUNE 29, 2018

Anyone who has followed my musical musing since June 2003 will know that I am a bit of a slut when it comes to music. I’ll “do” any genre (except freeform jazz). I guess my roots lie in “indie”, the lineage that stems from Bowie, The Clash, Joy Division, The Cure, New Order, REM, Pixies, Happy Mondays, Blur, Pulp, Radiohead, The Libertines and then...and then “indie” music kind of peters out. There are only so many musical conjugations of drum, guitar, bass and vocal. It became an exhausted idiom yielding diminishing returns. Whereas “indie” was once reactionary, a counterweight to the mainstream, now the effortless access neuters its outsider mentality. To put it another way, my mum could easily Spotify “My Bloody Valentine” if she wanted to be seen as a fan. Accessibility has evaporated the tribalism that those aforementioned bands attracted. Together with record industry myopia, we risk losing the traditional journey, that of a succession of transformative, boundary-pushing albums with all the twists and turns that entails, a journey that takes fans along for the ride.

There are a couple of notable exceptions, Nick Cave and Radiohead, though they began in the 1980s and 1990s respectively. There is one post-Internet band that has bucked the trend, maybe the last in the indie lineage...