'Suck It and See'

An album for when the vibe is nostalgic, vigorous, and unrequited.

Suck It and See -- The Vibe Triangulation

The Arctic Monkey’s fourth album is arguably the most slept on – and the best – that the band has ever produced. Coming out of the hazy desert rock of Humbug and marching steadily toward the brooding midnight of AM (the album largely regarded as their magnum opus), Suck It and See occupies a tone of youthful exuberance that belies potent themes of love, loss, and longing are perhaps only prophylactically explored in their sexier, edgier, and more mainstream works. Alex Turner’s customary poetry is found in evocative lines like, “Makes me want to blow the candles out, Just to see if you glow in the dark” and the band include some of the easy rock ‘n roll riffs that are their signature. On a whole, the album is an exploration of heartache and heartbreak wrapped in a bubblegum shell.

The album starts on what is perhaps a falsely optimistic note with, “She’s Thunderstorms” – a ballad brimming with a pure and a lustful love with nostalgia biting around the edges. This trend toward nostalgia hints at what’s to come in the rest of the album. The songs then ping-pong between performative cockiness with tracks like, “Brick by Brick” and emotional bankruptcy exemplified by, “The Hellcat…,” during which Alex Turner yells, “sing another fucking shalalala,” all under the protective canopy of a party time musical ethos. Shortly after the record flip, the tone shifts dramatically towards anguish and broken-heartedness (“And when I’m hanging on by the rings around my eyes, And I convince myself I need another, And for a minute it gets easier to pretend that you were just some lover”) before coming almost full circle, albeit a little sadder than it was at the start (“Don’t take it so personally, You’re not the only one, That time has got it in for honey, That’s where you’re wrong”). After all, who could go through such a journey and not be just a little sadder for it.

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$23.99 at Amazon