The Last Shadow Puppets

| Everything You’ve Come To Expect

Formed as a ‘supergroup’ side project between (primarily) Arctic Monkey Alex Jones and Rascal Miles Kane, The Last Shadow Puppets’ second album furthers their mutual love of reverbladen backing vocals and lush mid-60s string arrangements over well-fashioned indie songs written, they say, head to head in hotel rooms à la Lennon/McCartney. They lack that duo’s gift for killer hooks and catchy choruses, but you can have fun picking the source material— say, combines Scott Walker vocals with Duane Eddy picking and a Shadows solo—but the melange emerges fresh and modern, not mere pastiche. As fits the oeuvre, the parody period production is somewhat crunched rather than fully dynamic, while the self-imposed stylistic constraints do limit variety... indeed the closing songs seem to move forward in time—one with a 1970s disco vibe and the last with a solo Lennon sound. Time to switch decades perhaps? the strangely peaky production of its 2011 predecessor ‘Tank Full of Blues’, here a full rehearsal-room sound, if still lacking in any particular production sparkle. Paul Simon drops by to duet on the title track, moving around a bit as Dion hogs the centre and shoves Simon to the left channel, except for Simon’s feature verse—then back again. This and other pensive pieces perfectly punctuate the pacier blues that dominate, largely 12-bar with benefits—the licks well-honed, the songs memorable. A keeper. personality projected by this now-84-year-old. Arrangements are straight country beds lit by some delightful Appalachian picking and stoop-singing harmonies, neither stripped bare like late Johnny Cash (son John Carter Cash co-produces here with Lynn’s daughter Patsy Lynn Russell) nor pumped into the thrill-zone she created with Jack White for 2004’s ‘Van Lear Rose’. An album of this calibre makes a graceful retirement inconceivable; here’s hoping she can write the next as fast as she did her first. Even on ballads like No Rain, No Rainbow and the sole English language track The One (a kinda bonus), cliché is avoided through sheer extremism. Is that digital distortion on the fade of From Dusk Til Dawn? Who cares when GJ! crashes in with the magic Babymetal formula of joyride metal verse and catchy pop chorus. And should the tunes, the tones and the towering excess for some reason not solicit your surrender, the video performances may complete the conversion. Give it up. Jez Ford