Reintroducing Arctic Monkeys

It appears that Alex Turner, lead vocalist and principal songwriter of Arctic Monkeys, has wisely not let success go to his head. At the recent Brit Awards, where the English indie rock band picked up trophies for Best Group and Best Album for their latest, “AM,” he shared his perspective. “I refuse to put too much importance on these things. I’ve got a lot of respect for these ceremonies, but it’s not what we do it for and it never was.”

After their maiden single I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor debuted at the top spot of the UK charts in 2005, the foursome’s studio output — from 2006’s “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” to 2011’s “Suck It and See” — has grown darker, louder and odder. Apart from 2008’s “Covers Mixtape,” which featured instantly likeable versions of hits by Amy Winehouse, The Strokes, Girls Aloud and Shirley Bassey, “AM” seems to be their most accessible album to date. Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?, the third single, has proven especially popular, with covers by Chvrches and Miley Cyrus.

With its heavy use of falsetto and ‘70s rock and hip-hop beats, as well as its nods to Outkast, Aaliyah and Black Sabbath, “AM” has earned widespread acclaim. (Released in September 2013, it sounds, in parts, like a lower-slung “El Camino” by The Black Keys, the American band Arctic Monkeys opened for during the former’s 2012 US tour.) British music publication NME declared it “absolutely and unarguably the greatest record of their career.”
TAKING AMERICA – AND TUMBLR

While the accolades are welcome, perhaps what’s most baffling is the timing of it all. Arctic Monkeys is not exactly new, especially for UK-based fans and those with a taste for post-punk guitar music. But the band reached what could be the most impressive milestone of their already impressive career on the heels of “AM”: selling out an arena show for the first time at New York’s Madison Square Garden and, it seems, finally taking America. “Most of our time in the last seven years or whatever has been spent touring the US, so I think that’s built up this fanbase that’s been bubbling, and I guess it’s starting to spill over with this record,” Turner told the Guardian.

That Nate Auerbach, Tumblr’s music evangelist, said that Arctic Monkeys is currently “bigger than Lady Gaga” on the microblogging platform says a lot about the band’s staying power and slow-burning appeal. Most Tumblr users, in their teens and early 20s, are too young to have heard of the group when they broke out nearly a decade ago.

“AM,” its singles and videos have fared particularly well on the Yahoo-owned site, one of the newest indicators of success; in the past 30 days, 57,000 people wrote Tumblr posts with the words “Arctic Monkeys.” Their remarkable online following today mirrors the band’s beginnings. Arctic Monkeys was one of the acts to first come to prominence via the Internet — through a MySpace page created by fans — representing another way in which new musicians can be promoted and marketed.

CHARISMATIC ROCK ICON

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Alex Turner is a charismatic frontman and deft songwriter. Still only 28, he has gone through a host of guises. He was a scruffy Sheffield scamp during the band’s earliest days and a Glastonbury Romeo when he was with British fashion darling Alexa Chung from 2007 to 2011. Now, thanks to a head-to-toe rockabilly makeover, he resembles a young, doe-eyed George Harrison from the Beatles’ Hamburg days in the 1960s.

More than Turner’s side project The Last Shadow Puppets, it’s probably his solo score for the 2011 coming-of-age film Submarine that began to endear him to a much younger audience. The stripped-back affair, largely acoustic musings of a witty small-town teen, was as much a surprise hit as Submarine itself, the directorial debut of The IT Crowd comedian Richard Ayoade. Of the six tracks on the EP, Stuck On The Puzzle is closest to belonging to “AM.”

In Another Man magazine’s spring/summer 2013 issue, Turner may have at last accepted his rock icon status. “When it happens I can deal with it a lot better now; as a belligerent 17-year-old I was a bit more like, ‘What the f*ck is going on?’” Well said.

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