Will sweary Swift leave the Arctics cursing in the race for No 1?
Albums still matter, and never more than in mid-October, when the record companies wheel out the big guns. Next week’s No 1 will be either Taylor Swift or Arctic Monkeys – a clever female pop star from Pennsylvania, or a clever male rock band from Sheffield.
Last November, facing a similar duel with Adele, Swift moved her release date. She hasn’t done so this time. Perhaps she expects to win, or perhaps she has never heard of Arctic Monkeys.
What the two acts have in common is that they have already reinvented themselves. Swift made her name as a teenage country singer before adroitly switching to pop. During lockdown she changed horses again, to moody modern folk. Now that phase seems to be over too. Taylor’s gone electric!
The main influences on Midnights are her peers: The Weeknd, Harry Styles and especially Billie Eilish. Swift and her co-writer Jack Antonoff are making bedroom pop. It’s breathy, twitchy and thoroughly catchy.
It’s also sweary. Swift, who lives mostly in London and likes going to the pub with her boyfriend, the actor Joe Alwyn, has started effing and blinding like a true Londoner. One track is actually called Vigilante S**t. Even when cursing, or cramming in rather too many of her diary-style thoughts, Swift retains her charm.
Arctic Monkeys are the biggest rock band to emerge this century. But they don’t give the impression that they want to be.
Britain loves them anyway. Last week the band were in the album chart at Nos 8, 30 and 55, with records that were all at least nine years old. They were outselling Adele. But one Arctic Monkeys album was missing – the last one, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (2018).
That album was a radical departure, a collection of lounge music set on the Moon. It sold about onesixth as well as its predecessor, the majestic AM. More importantly, it broke the golden rule of artistic development: you can do what you like as long as you remain recognisably you.
After going to the Moon, people usually come back down to Earth. Instead Alex Turner, Arctic Monkeys’ singer and songwriter, has opted to stay in orbit. Musically, even vocally, The Car is Tranquility Base MkII. Sung in a knowing falsetto, it’s a set of lounge ballads with a little lush soul attached.
The best of the ballads are very good indeed. There’d Better Be A Mirrorball has the grandeur of a Bond theme; Body Paint has a melody so effortless that it could have been written by George Michael. It’s just that both would stand out more if they had fast songs around them.
Turner is a proper rock star with sparkling intelligence. At 36, he has spent half his life in the harsh glare of fame and lived to tell the tale. The problem is that the tales he now writes are so much about fame, and ‘the business of show’ as he puts it, that they’re only half-engaging. The Car, despite its fitful excellence, feels like a solo vehicle.
When Arctic Monkeys headlined Reading and Leeds in August, they played only one song from it, plus two from Tranquility. On stage, they’re still a rock band. It will be fascinating to see if that’s still the case on next year’s stadium tour.