The Last Shadow Puppets The Age of the Understatement by: Ed Butler Thu:08-May-08 Label: Domino Year: 2008 WB rating 80 out of 100

With the release of last year’s Favourite Worst Nightmare, Alex Turner, with his Arctic Monkey cohorts, established that he was no one trick pony. Spurning the path most often traveled, Favourite Worst Nightmare avoided easy cliché and retreading the catchy post-punk of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not and made songs that were not produced with a mass audience in mind, choosing, for example, the song with no chorus as lead single. As such, it was with some excitement that the world awaited the release of The Last Shadow Puppets debut, Turner’s side project with Miles Kane.

There is something thrilling about listening to musical talent growing up in public. Most bands appear on the scene fully formed, the product of many years’ touring, honing their craft, and with an arsenal of musical influences collected and collated through years of ‘classic’ albums. Turner, much like fellow teen prodigies such as Silverchair’s Daniel Johns, garnered international acclaim and major label deals at the age of 19, the same age that many of us are only acquainting ourselves with Sgt Peppers, and would have had only a limited musical vocabulary. On the evidence of The Age of the Understatement, he has been avidly expanding that lexicon in the intervening years.

Lead single, opening track, ‘The Age of the Understatement’ opens much as if Mr Turner had abducted and replaced Matt Bellamy and assumed his role at the front of Muse. Galloping ‘Knights of Cydonia’ rhythms paired with his now distinctly familiar nasal vocalizations, and Kane’s backing vocals synching almost uncannily with Turner. It’s quite an epic, really, a widescreen panorama of melody and majesty that it seems Turner felt unable to create with his usual bandmates.

Because it certainly seems as though Turner is escaping from the claustrophobic, introverted nationalism of The Arctic Monkeys, the inherent need, imposed by the incredibly Britishness of Whatever People Say I Am… which, it must be said, is no one’s fault but their own. The Alex Turner of 2008, all of 22 years old, is older, better travelled, and as such, he has a broader world view, and has developed a musical palette to match his newly discovered worldliness. The offshoot of this, or perhaps the cause, is Turner’s lyrical shift. Where on his Arctic Monkeys recordings lyrics are small scale, economical, and deeply personal – in a stories-about-my-home-town-and-the-denizens-therein kind of way – on The Age of the Understatement, everything gets the broadsheet treatment. On the highlight ‘Black Plant’, lyrics like “Why would you say sorry?” abound, a potentially rhetorical question to a potentially fictional sparring partner. Such allegory and ambiguousness is new to the repertoire, and is a welcome addition at that.

To match the lyrical expansiveness is a marked musical move away from the proto-chav-punk of earlier recordings. The Age of the Understatement sounds as though Turner has turned over a collection of old B-sides to Burt Bacharach for re-arranging. Producer James Ford, who contributes drums, washes every available inch of the record in lush strings, recalling Barry White and Isaac Hayes at their most willfully extravagant, adding to the album’s sense of intimate epic-ness.

Even ‘I Don’t Like You Anymore’, the most Monkeys-esque number here, is determinedly atmospheric. With creepy, horror movie keys and sparse verses which would not sit comfortably alongside ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’. ‘I Don’t Like You Anymore’ rollicks along nicely for three minutes, before segueing smoothly into the vigorous strings and bass drum of ‘In My Room’, which, despite the title, still features Turner talking to the ubiquitous ‘you’. Following that comes possibly the loveliest song Turner may ever write, ‘Meeting Place’. Shimmering violins, languid bass and acoustic chugs waft around his melodramatic words. That he sings “I’m sorry I met you darling” hardly seems relevant.

On The Age of the Understatement, Alex Turner (with apologies to Miles Kane, but this is overwhelmingly a Turner project – despite the differences from the Arctic Monkeys, it has his prints all over it) has shown, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the determinedly non-commercial shift of Favourite Worst Nightmare was no one-off. And even more importantly, that Turner is, indeed, one of the most talented new songwriters to grace our wirelesses for some time.