The Royal Albert Hall, a music hall with ideas about its station, is a weirdly apposite place for the Arctic Monkeys to play. The band’s most celebrated mode is the fast, literate indie-punk of their first LP which modulated into brawny desert blues and then on to soulful, swaggering stadium rock for their most successful album, 2013’s AM. But throughout, there’s been another style, where Alex Turner seems to don a suit and croon for the bingo-playing masses: you can hear it as he address the “scummy man” in When the Sun Goes Down, or in The Jeweller’s Hands at the end of Humbug, or his take on John Cooper Clarke’s I Wanna Be Yours from AM.
And it’s this style that the band’s new album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino – performed live here for the first time in the UK – expands upon. Turner takes the twisted light-entertainer shtick of Scott Walker, or his fellow Sheffield expat Jarvis Cocker (Pulp’s This Is Hardcore sounds like a major touchstone) and uses it on supper-club songs that shimmer like the cheap chandelier fittings in your grandma’s house. Some might say this is a pose, that’s he’s insulating himself with quotation marks: an ironic crooner giving it some smirking razzle-dazzle. Maybe so, but just as he regards his peers with both fondness and disgust on A Certain Romance, Turner can happily hold two opposing thoughts – he might be taking the piss a bit, but when he lets his voice soar, he finds himself meaning it too.
Both these sides and more are on show at this often masterful showcase of British rock’n’roll. Opening with Four Out of Five, a droll fantasy of a gentrified moon, Turner makes self-mocking simian shapes around the slow ‘okey cokey of the rhythm section. With his slicked-back hair he resembles the psychopathic Bob from Twin Peaks crossed with a minor Scarface goon, though later, when he tucks it behind his ear, he is briefly a prim 1950s secretary. Later he says “We’d like to play you now the title track of our new LP” like Dean Martin, with full-bore irony, and at one point introduces guitarist Jamie Cook like an R&B star showing off his band.
But they all can’t help but feel it. Knee Socks is almost cruel in its funky exactitude; Cornerstone is brimming with restless romance; One Point Perspective sees Turner makes priapic poses with one of his many beautiful guitars, but is genuinely sexy.
The band, bolstered by supporting players on keys and acoustic guitar, are immaculately drilled – sometimes too much so, as on Pretty Visitors, which hops around with math-rock fussiness, or She Looks Like Fun, which looks tremendously enjoyable for Cook but will surely not hang around their setlist for long.
Much better is when their chops are transmuted into pure energy: Brianstorm, Don’t Sit Down ’Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair and View from the Afternoon swerve too fast through their corners and are all the better for it. The drummer Matt Helders, a mere timekeeper during the Tranquility Base material, is transformed into a dynamo; with a spotlight behind him, he becomes a tub-thumping Godzilla on the rear wall.
Wherever they turn, irony dissolves and Turner, acting out lyrics like “I lost my train of thought” or “she held me very tightly” with am-dram theatricality, can’t help but be a real rock star even as he plays with the role. In the end, every side to the band – funk troupe, garage punks, aloof posers, heartfelt songwriters – coheres on the closing R U Mine?, a diamond anthem that tightens and collapses at all the right moments. Now armed with what is essentially a greatest-hits set, Arctic Monkeys have become a band who can do everything – it might be a construct, but it feels so real.
