2018: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino - Arctic Monkeys
Looking back at 30 years of music | Arctic Monkeys, Joan Baez, Kamasi Washington, Connan Mockasin, U.S Girls, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Courtney Barnett, Hinds, Paul McCartney, John Prine
You step off the shuttle and look around. There’s been a lot of excited buzz about this place but now that you’re here, there doesn’t seem to be another soul in sight. The place doesn’t look like much. A brutalist building that seems to be standing in the middle of nowhere. It’s blocking out the light of the moons and he lights in the sky have gone out. You step forward and the doors in front of you part, bathing you in the warm lobby light. You look at your watch. 19:54. Check-in starts at 8.
I hope you’ve packed your Savile-row space-suit, it’s time to look sharp. Watch your step as you cross the lobby; the air is rarefied here and the lights are low so you have to keep your wits about you as you go. As soon as you’re through the door a band starts up in the lounge. Their playing disorients you; you haven’t heard anything like this in a long time and you especially weren’t expecting to find something like this here. You look around to see who they’re playing for, but there is no other sign of life up here.
You step up to the counter. Yes, that’s right - you’re only here to take it easy for little while. 40 minutes and 57 seconds, to be precise. Yes, it was such an easy flight, thank you. Yes, that’s right, you did hear all the good reviews. It’s why you’re here. To be honest, you expected the place to be more popular considering all that you’ve read about it. Perhaps it’ll get busier later. Your eyes drift beyond the clerk to the clock on the far wall. You double take. That can’t be right. It must be a trick of the light. Apparently it’s 19:73.
It’s not the only strange thing you experience once you’ve checked in to the Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino.
In a time where music has almost come full circle, where the album is seen by some as merely a collection of singles; a collection of songs where the best tracks are to be cherry picked for a playlist and the rest discarded forevermore, Tranquility Hotel Base + Casino is a breath of fresh air. A rare concept album in the streaming age, 11 songs of a piece. 11 pieces of a puzzle that doesn’t work without any of it’s composite parts. With an album like this, how would you pick out just one or two songs to keep? It’s a retro-futurist Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This is the seventies in space. It’s crazy, but it’s great.
But when it came out, not everyone thought so. There was a lot of confusion upon release. Had Alex Turner accidentally packaged his new Last Shadow Puppets record as an Arctic Monkeys release? What was this boring, pretentious mess? Where were the fuzzy, upbeat landfill indie tracks about moody teenagers filling up northern dancefloors?
An immediate outlier in the Arctic Monkeys oeuvre, it doesn’t sound like anything they’d ever made before. But that was fine by me. I’d always preferred The Strokes anyway, and, from the very first line of this new album, it seemed so did Alex Turner. Arctic Monkeys had always sounded too British for my liking. Too straight ahead and one dimensional, so hearing them try something daring, something really far out was an extremely welcome surprise.
The album has got a great sound, a great feel. It transports you into space the second you drop the needle on the opener, Star Treatment.
The arrangements are endlessly fascinating. There are elements of glam-rock and funk; Blaxploitation, blue-eyed soul and plenty of others in here, besides, and each and every reference filtered through a space-age, piano led lounge band feel. Some songs sound like they could have scored any number of cult-classic 70’s B-Movies.
There are some truly sublime lyrics throughout the album, too, and, despite all the sci-fi imagery, fake-space-hotel-lobby-band narrative and surrealism, some of the best lines and most affecting lines are deceptively simple (“Oh the dawn won’t stop weighing a tonne, I’ve done some things that I shouldn’t have done / But I haven’t stopped loving you once).
This is a warm album, it’s an intriguing album. It’s an album that takes takes you to new places each time you listen to it, each time you check in to the Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. It’ll have you slow-dancing the apocalypse. It’ll get you lost in time, lost in space and lost in thought.
Or maybe, I just imagined it all.
Elsewhere in 2018…
One of my absolute favourite ever recordings arrived in 2018, thanks to Joan Baez and Tom Waits.
Whistle Down the Wind wasn’t the first Tom Waits song that Joan Baez had recorded, and in fact it’s not even the only Tom Waits song she covers on the album of the same name, but I think it is the one that she does most perfectly. Her voice has aged beautifully. She has lost a little bit of the upper register that she wielded so well in the 60s, but for everything she has lost, she has gained something in its place. She now sings with a depth that adds so much extra weight to these sublime lyrics.
The combination of her performance, these lyrics (“I’m not all I thought I’d be, but I’ve always stayed around”) and knowing it will likely be her last album makes this such an arresting, haunting and affecting collection of recordings. It breaks my heart and enriches my soul every time I hear it.
I saw Joan Baez at the Royal Albert Hall a few months after this album came out, on her farewell tour. If it really is the last album and tour that she’ll perform, as it seems is the case, then she went out at the top of her game.
Another record that could also be described from 2018 as “arresting, haunting and affecting” is Kamasi Washington’s Heaven and Earth double album. Here are some other words that can describe it: biblical, overwhelming, spiritual. Towering. Overawing. Monumental.
A friend who saw Kamasi Washington and his band perform these songs around this time told me that being in the audience and hearing that music felt like a religious experience. I don’t doubt that for a second, as even just listening through your speakers at home can feel that way. The power that is transmitted by this record is like almost nothing else I’ve ever felt or heard. It feels like you’re hearing the music of all time coming at you all at once, from every angle and dimension. It can be a lot at times. This album will push you to the brink, even from the get go on Fists of Fury, but it’ll also pull you back and spiritually enrich you at times, like on The Space Travelers Lullaby.
If those other space travellers, the Arctic Monkeys, took their new lounge sound into outer space, then there was another act taking it in a different direction. Connan Mockasin released his fourth album Jassbusters, a collection of laid-back, late night dreams that drift across the seedier side of your mind. Mockasin’s excellent guitar work does most of the heavy lifting, where Alex Turners’ piano does on Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino. These albums are two sides of the same coin, but one is in the heavens whilst the other is pitched somewhere much further down.
One record which almost sits between these two arrived courtesy of U.S. Girls in early February. In a Poem Unlimited is another spacey, grooving burst of retro tracks. More varied and at times bombastic than either TBH+C or Jassbusters, the album probably aims higher than those two in places but also falls much flatter than either in others. Opener Velvet 4 Sale lurches and beguiles, Rage of Plastics recalls Bowie’s Young Americans as it opens and then becomes something entirely it’s own and third song M.A.H. is the most fun to be had anywhere on the album, with its Blondie-esque melody. Unfortunately, the album never hits those heights again, with only really Pearly Gates getting close.
Whilst there was plenty of retro/futurism around in 2018, there were some albums that just had a straight up retro feel. Maybe the best of the lot came from Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, whose Tearing At the Seams was packed with soulful Americana and features the sublime Hey Mama, Babe I Know, Coolin’ Out and You Worry Me. Probably the best of all their albums.
Following up her excellent 2015 album debut Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit was Australian rocker Courtney Barnett. Her second record, Tell Me How You Really Feel, is one of my favourite albums ever. More fleshed out, confident, fuller sounding and fully-realised than her first outing, this album is full of great lyrics (“friends treat you like a stranger and / strangers treat you like your best friend, oh well”), great melodies and great guitar parts. There’s not a bad song in sight, and they each got even better when performed live in concert.
Another strong second indie album came from Hinds, a Spanish four-piece garage band. Their album I Don’t Run is a wonderful explosion of messy energy; fuzzed up guitars and raucous vocals. It’s a lot of fun to turn this one up and let loose with tracks like opener The Club, I Feel Cold But I Feel More or To the Morning Light.
At the other end of his career, but just as energetic, Paul McCartney released Egypt Station. Whilst a lot of acts were spending 2018 trying to sound much older than they were, McCartney was once again trying to sound a lot younger than he was. He had a lot of good songs for this album - like I Don’t Know, Happy With You and Who Cares - but the production from Greg Kurstin and Ryan Tedder doesn’t really do him any favours. McCartney sounds every one of his 75 years, but the music doesn’t always reflect that, and so a lot of the album just sounds quite jarring.
Someone who never sounded anything but their own age was John Prine. His music is like the warm embrace of a loved one, someone who has seen you at both your highest and your lowest and who has always known what you needed in every situation. Listening to his albums always feels like an afternoon well spent with a group of your most favourite friends. His 2018 release, The Tree of Forgiveness, is no exception.
Like Joan Baez, 2018 would see John Prine release his final album, although unlike Baez, he didn’t know it that would be the case. Also like Joan Baez, Prine ended his recording career on a collection of mighty fine songs and performances, such as the sublime I Have Met My Love Today; the devastating Summer’s End and the perfect No Ordinary Blue, Boundless Love and God Only Knows.
The fact that we lost him, much too soon, to the Coronavirus in 2020 makes his decision to end the album with the track When I Get to Heaven much more poignant. His poignancy was always tempered by his sense of humour, though, and fittingly the track is at times heartbreaking and hilarious. God only knows, he probably would have appreciated that this was his final send off. I only hope that someday I can meet him out there down the road a ways. When I get to heaven, God as my witness, I’ll head on over to the nightclub called The Tree of Forgiveness. Then I’m going to shake John Prine’s hand and say, “thanks for all the music”.
Notable album releases…
Ariana Grande - Sweetener
The Beths - Future Hates Me
Father John Misty - God’s Favourite Customer
Julia Holter - Aviary
Kacey Musgraves - Golden Hour
Kali Uchis - Isolation
Khruangbin – Con Todo El Mundo
Mitski - Be the Cowboy
Natalie Prass - The Future and the Past
Snail Mail - Lush
Bonus tracks, odds and ends…
If all that wasn’t enough, there were still more great releases that I didn’t get around to writing about above. I didn’t get around to writing about Kurt Vile’s Bottle It In record, which is home to my two favourite Kurt Vile tracks in Bassackwards and One Trick Ponies. Maybe this release could have slotted in alongside the Connan Mockasin paragraph above, or the Courtney Barnett one, but I couldn’t find the space for it. Another that I didn’t have enough to say about to make it into the article, but which is an arresting performance nonetheless, is Ry Cooder’s Straight Street from The Prodigal Son.
Marc Ribot coaxed Tom Waits out of recording retirement for a chilling rendition of the anti-fascist anthem Bella Ciao (Goodbye Beautiful) on his Songs of Resistance 1942-2018 album. How we need songs like these more and more.
Another that came along in 2018 was Let’s Go Rain from Jeff Tweedy’s solo album, Warm. In the song Tweedy calls on a great flood to come and wash the world away so we can start a new one with more compassion.
Someone who knows all about Hard Rain, Bob Dylan has written more songs of resistance for the modern canon than almost anyone, and offered his own recording of resistance, of a kind, with his contribution to the Record Store Day exclusive Universal Love – Wedding Songs Reimagined. An album of same-sex love songs performed by various artists, Dylan transformed the 1929 Neil Moret / Richard Whiting composition She’s Funny That Way into He’s Funny That Way. One of the more delightful additions in Dylan’s detour into the Great American Songbook, He’s Funny That Way is a light, playful and beautiful performance.
Dylan spent this summer touring with Willie Nelson. They’ve crossed paths plenty of times over the years, and around this time they must each have been spending a lot of time with Old Blue Eyes himself, as well. Following on from Dylan’s Shadows in the Night in 2015, Fallen Angels in 2016 and Triplicate in 2017, Nelson put out his own Sinatra covers album in 2018, and his 68th solo album overall, My Way. The album is, of course, a true delight. A master interpreter working with some of the finest material ever written.
Someone else who knows how to sing the songbook well is Haley Reinhart. Probably most famous for her contributions to the Scott Bradley Postmodern Jukebox series, she has got one of the greatest voices in contemporary music, but is never given the material or production to prove this on her own albums. In 2018, though, she did get the chance to spread out a little, showing off her talent on the most unlikely of releases: The Capitol Studios Sessions by Jeff Goldblum and The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra.
Elsewhere, there were great tracks from two members of The Strokes - Leave It In My Dreams by The Voidz (Julian Casablancas’ other band) and Muted Beatings by Albert Hammond Jr - but no sign of a follow up to the bands promising Future Present Past EP from two years previously.
And finally, from an album which came out right at the start of the year, a collection of beautiful recordings from one of the unlikelier sources. From his Nonesuch Records album Diary: January 27, 2018, Mandy Patinkin delivered a couple of stunning renditions of his label-mate Randy Newman’s classics in Dayton, Ohio 1903 and Living Without You. The latter track is especially beautiful, arresting and haunting but, then again, so are most of the songs on the album. Including renditions of songs by both Loudon and Rufus Wainwright, Stephen Merritt and Marc Bolan, these theatrical readings captivate and torture you with equal measure; they cut to your core. Patinkin’s performance and delivery here is as perfect as any scene from Inigo Montoya, or Saul Berensen.
Next up: Angel Olsen to Zella Day, via Billie Eilish, Faye Webster and Marika Hackman.
Love the Joan-Tom combo but to me nothing beats Day After Tomorrow (both the song and album—some great Steve Earle covers on there too)