The Last Shadow Puppets

[DiamondSea]

scanned by me

Alex comes of age on new LP

ALEX TURNER has swapped booze and birds for tear-jerking break-up songs on his new album.

The ARCTIC MONKEYS frontman has collaborated with THE RASCALS singer MILES KANE on The Age Of The Understatement. I’ve had an exclusive listen and here’s my review.

The duo have named their outfit THE LAST SHADOW PUPPETS and have produced a brooding and intensely personal set of songs.

The 12-track collection clocks in at just 34 minutes but packs an emotional punch.

The tales of hi-jinx that filled both Monkeys albums are absent.

Almost every track is full of heartbreak and heartache. One of my favourites is Separate And Ever Deadly, a spooky march with gloomy church bells where Miles screams: “Can’t you see I’m a ghost in the wrong coat biting butter and crumbs.”


Meeting Place is the most emotional track and describes the pain of a relationship in meltdown.

It sounds like it’s influenced by Alex’s split with ex Johanna Bennett before he got together with current girlfriend, TV presenter ALEXA CHUNG.

Turner and Kane have produced a beautiful, mature and occasionally harrowing album.

And that’s no understatement at all.

the sun

Take one Arctic Monkey and one young Rascal and what do you have, asks Ben Thompson. Rocking new duo the Last Shadow Puppets, that's what...

Sunday March 16, 2008
The Observer


The Last Shadow Puppets are a band with two lead singers. As one of them is Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, that might point to an uneven balance of power between the two. But listening to the less familiar voice of Miles Kane (mainstay of Wirral-based up-and-comers the Rascals) snapping at Turner's heels throughout the headlong gallop of their thrillingly opulent and dynamic debut single, 'The Age of the Understatement', it seems this particular job-share is strictly 50/50.

'There's nothing innocent about Miles Kane,' Turner warns, in case anyone was planning to accuse him of luring his fresh-faced co-conspirator into a decadent world of rock star self-indulgence. 'He is the antithesis of innocence.' 'Ooh,' Kane retorts, archly, 'you scampi fry.'
Tucking into their sandwiches in a quiet alcove of a Wapping riverside pub, these two 22-year-olds could easily be twins. 'I suppose we are quite symmetrical today,' says Turner, pondering their complementary wardrobes (close-fitting leather jackets, black jeans and pointy boots).

'We're both only children,' says Kane, 'and we've got similar mothers as well.' The first time they stayed at each other's houses, they realised they even ate 'the same little chocolates - Breakaways... Blue Ribands'.

Soon this mutual affinity for biscuity nourishment expanded into a shared love of the way Scott Walker's 'Jackie' 'filled the senses'. And this well-matched duo began to wonder what would happen if they took a break from their day jobs and tried to make a record that exuded the same sense of grandeur. 'Rather than waiting till our early thirties to do a collaboration like that,' Kane says, 'we thought, "Let's do it while we're still really young, so there's a different energy behind all the drama."'

A different energy is one attribute the resulting album, The Age of the Understatement, can certainly be credited with. Having invited Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford to play the drums, then handed Arcade Fire helpmeet Owen Pallett the conductor's baton and told him they wanted strings that weren't too 'forest-y', Turner and Kane have created a marvellously expansive tribute to the excitement of the big city and the allure of the sophisticated female.

Gleefully oblivious to the florid legacy of previous attempts to channel the genius of Scott Walker, the Last Shadow Puppets have made an implausibly direct connection with the swinging Sixties mother lode. In fact, if Billy Liar had only had the balls to actually get on that train to London and persuade John Barry to help him make an album about how much Julie Christie meant to him, The Age of the Understatement is roughly what it might have sounded like.

omm

A small picture of the album cover

arctic monkeys forum

 

[modela]

whos the lady on the cover?

 

[modela]

julie christie??

 

[DiamondSea]

whos the lady on the cover?

I don't know. People have speculated that it's her though.

Is anyone sure?

 

[kanita]

That does look like Julie Christie to me...didn't Alex' girlfriend credit her as a style icon...?

 

[DiamondSea]

That does look like Julie Christie to me...didn't Alex' girlfriend credit her as a style icon...?

Yeah, she did. -
"I just want to be Jane Birkin or Julie Christie the whole time. They're the only people who matter."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/main.jhtml?xml=/fashion/2007/12/09/st_partyfrocks.xml

Release details

SINGLE. (14/04/08)

7" (ONE)
A.The Age Of The Understatement
B. Two Hearts in Two Weeks

7" (TWO)
A.The Age Of The Understatement
B. In The Heat Of The Morning

CD
1. The Age Of The Understatement
2. Two Hearts In Two Weeks
3. Wondrous Place

The digital single will be available from the 7th of April.

ALBUM. (21/04/08)

age of the understatement


Apparently, they will be performing on Jools Holland on April 15th with a 12 piece orchestra.

 

[DiamondSea]

amforum

 

[lunabella]

thanks for that. . . they are boring in interviews. the music is much better!

 

[DiamondSea]

amforum

 

[DiamondSea]

amforum

 

[DiamondSea]

amforum

 

[DiamondSea]

The b-sides to the single

In the Heat of the Morning (David Bowie cover)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szh3AasP7tI

Wonderous Place (Billy Fury cover)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_JyVvzm3hg

Two Hearts in Two Weeks (original song)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANmfbPxYvNs

David Bowie has expressed his delight at Alex Turner and Miles Kane's cover of one of his songs.

The Last Shadow Puppets have recorded 'In The Heat Of The Morning' as the b-side of their first release, single 'The Age Of The Understatement', out on April 14.

Having now heard their cover, Bowie told his website Davidbowie.com that he loved their version.

"That's a delight!" declared the legend. "How lovely. A daymaker."

nme

20 second previews of the album trackshttp://www.arcticmonkeysfrance.com/index.php

 

[lunabella]

thanks, those are nice! can't wait to get the album.

 

[DiamondSea]

Review from the Independent -

3/5

Reviewed by Anthony Quinn
Friday, 11 April 2008

The Last Shadow Puppets is an Arctic Monkeys spin-off project, in which songwriter Alex Turner and his pal Miles Kane from The Rascals indulge their passion for sophisticated, grandiose pop.

These 11 co-written missives are urgent narratives and observations whipped to a froth of melodramatic intensity by Owen Pallett's dizzy, swirling orchestrations and littered with suitably elegant coinages like "innocence and arrogance entwined" and "the one you fell for makes everything juvenile".

The latter line, from "Standing Next To Me", hints at what the music confirms: that Turner and Kane are here mapping a more mature milieu, one where the sweat derives not so much from physical propulsion as from emotional tension. There's a pronounced Spanish tinge to songs such as the flamencoid "Black Plant" and the extraordinary "Only the Truth", where the bustling horns and whirlwind strings vividly evoke the protagonist's emotional turmoil. A brave undertaking.

Pick of the album:'Only the Truth', 'Standing Next To Me', 'Calm Like You'

There's a video of an acoustic performance of the single on their website and the rest of the album tracks will be added soon
http://www.theageoftheunderstatement.com/

From a gig in Madrid-

Some more from the New York gigs-

Promo shots-

Some oldies-

all amforum

 

[lunabella]

man, i just want to give alex some acne cream and then marry him.

 

[DiamondSea]

The Times' album review

The Last Shadow Puppets: The Age of the Understatement

Pete Paphides

3/5

There was little understatement about pop in the 1960s. Music may have been irrevocably changed by rock’n’roll; but to be a band in that era really represented the best of both worlds. You could write and record your own songs – weird as you liked – and then, should you need it, you could deploy the services of arrangers who learnt their trade in an era when most popular music was steered by a conductor’s baton.

These people still had to find work in a radically changed music industry. The unsung heroes of songs by the Bee Gees, Dusty Springfield and the Shadows were characters such as Bill Shepherd, Ivor Raymonde and Norrie Paramor.

Of all the current indie vanguard, it seems surprising that Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner – in tandem with the Rascals frontman Miles Kane, the arranger Owen Pallet and the producer James Ford – should have yearned to recreate those days with his latest project. At least it seems surprising until you hear the new single yielded by the alliance. Listening to words tumble from Turner’s mouth on The Age of Understatement, you realise that perhaps this may have been what he was hearing in his head when he presented his “proper” band with Brianstorm.

The two songs aren’t so different, except for the lyrical worlds from which they spring. It takes no genius to work out that Scott Walker has crashed into Turner and Kane’s lives in dramatic fashion. The buccaneering narratives dispensed by the two even chime with the accidental poetic nuances that – on Walker’s album of Jacques Brel songs – came of translating a Belgian writer’s lyrics into English.

“Can’t you see I’m a ghost in the wrong coat, biting butter and crumbs?” they declaim with spittle-flecked zeal on Separate and Ever Deadly – while the excellent Calm Like You unfolds in streets that smell of “burglary and fireworks”.

Don’t think it a bad thing that the kinetic charge of Standing Next To Me shares most of its DNA with Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich’s Legend of Xanadu. It isn’t – although, oddly, the influence of Richard Hawley yields the most unnecessary moments: a lament called The Time Has Come and The Chamber.

A couple of years ago, Turner seemed to display an almost aggressive mistrust of everything that newfound celebrity had conferred upon him. Some people treat fame like a prison; others are quick to realise that it’ll allow them to try all sorts of things that the rest of us wouldn’t dare dream of.

In The Age of the Understatement Turner sounds as if he’s having a blast. And even if one or two songs wear a smirk out of all proportion to their actual cleverness, it would take a curmudgeon not to join in.

The Guardian's album review

The Last Shadow Puppets, The Age of the Understatement(Domino)

Friday April 18, 2008
The Guardian

CD of the Week
3/5

When Scott Walker gave a handful of interviews around his 2006 album The Drift, talk occasionally turned to current pop music. Perhaps to emphasise that he wasn't quite the aloof recluse of popular myth, he mentioned the buzz band of the moment: "I've heard the Arctic Monkeys," he offered, hopefully, "and all that kind of thing."

At least he now knows that the admiration is mutual. Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner and Miles Kane of Wirral trio the Rascals have mentioned a few influences on their album as the Last Shadow Puppets, pre-fame David Bowie and composer-producer David Axelrod among them, but the longest shadow over The Age of the Understatement is undoubtedly cast by the former Scott Engel. "More Scott Walker than Scott Walker" said one radio DJ before premiering the album's title track, which led at least one listener to momentarily hope that Turner and Kane had made an album influenced by the enigmatic singer's latterday hitting-lumps-of-raw-meat-while-screaming-about-Mussolini approach, if only to see the reaction from the more lumpen sections of Arctic Monkeys' fanbase.

Perhaps inevitably, however, it's his vintage work that holds the duo in thrall. Sometime Arcade Fire collaborator Owen Pallett has been drafted in to play the role of Wally Scott, the orchestral arranger who cut such a surprising figure in recent Walker documentary 30 Century Man, largely because he's now a sweet old lady called Margaret. My Mistakes Were Made For You steals pretty much everything from Scott 4's The Old Man's Back Again. Quite aside from his music, you can see why the figure of Scott Walker - with his noble-but-doomed struggle to interest a resolutely mainstream British audience in things like existentialism, arthouse cinema and Gallic chanson - might appeal to Turner, a sensitive and intelligent songwriter who spends a hefty proportion of his life watching crowds of Hackett-clad troglodytes chuck beer at each other while Arctic Monkeys play live. In response, the more excitable areas of the music press have started carrying on as if Alex Turner is the first person in history to make an album influenced by Scott Walker. I've researched this thoroughly and can exclusively reveal that he isn't.

However, Kane and Turner seem more interested in Walker's uptempo material than the ballads previously imitated to the point of cliche. There are tracks here that amble anonymously down an drearily well-trodden path, not least The Chamber and Black Plant. But if the album has a recurring motif, it's the galloping rhythm borrowed from Walker's version of Jacques Brel's Mathilde: hardly a commonplace sound in latterday alt-rock. Its darting pace fits with the audible enthusiasm of an artist broadening his scope. With no Rascals album as a yardstick, it's hard to judge how big a digression this is for Kane, but it's clearly a stimulating departure for Turner. The lyrics move away from his usual witty-but-prosaic observations into more opaque invention, without sacrificing sharpness. "I can still remember when your city smelt exciting," begins Calm Like You. "Burglary and fireworks, the skies they were alight." It's a pretty gripping way to open a song.

More unexpected are the album's dabblings in high camp, a phrase seldom used in conjunction with Arctic Monkeys: with his lads-mag model girlfriend and background in tiling, you really can't imagine guitarist James "Cookie" Cook making with the limp wrists and extravagant flourishes. Here, however, Turner delivers the line "the girl with many strategies wakes the wolves to curse them to their knees", while in the background, a tango rhythm thunders, strings flutter and swirl and a horn section does its nut. You can't really hear it without picturing him singing with one hand on his hip and the other doing something flamboyant: given Arctic Monkeys' constituency, you have to admit there's a certain fearlessness on display.

There's also a certain eagerness: recorded in a fortnight, The Age of the Understatement fizzes with the zeal of the recent musical convert. The duo's almost indistinguishable voices occasionally chafe against the lush backing, but there's still a fervour to their harmonies at odds with Turner's usual laconic approach. Their pastiches feature such an abundance of loving detail that The Age of the Understatement frequently seems as much about the overwhelming effect Scott Walker's greatest hits can have on the listener as the mysterious femme fatale who inhabits almost every lyric. It's an album that bounds out of the speakers, grabs you by the arm and starts yelling about the fantastic records it's been listening to recently. Even if you heard those same records years ago, it's hard not to find that kind of enthusiasm infectious.

The Sun's album review

THE LAST SHADOW PUPPETS - Age Of The Understatement

****

IN the Sixties, there was no stopping the first creative flushes of youth.

Songs simply poured from the pop stars of the day. The Beatles, Stones and Dylan could release their latest masterpiece album every few months.

As the decades passed, however, things slowed down. The music industry began stifling artists by devising laborious, drawn-out marketing strategies to maximise sales.

In the download age of 2008, however, it’s the artists, not the labels, who are getting back on top and putting music out when they want to on their own terms.

Take Alex Turner. Still only 22, he’s on an incredible roll that harks back to those simpler, perhaps more innocent times.

2006: Arctic Monkeys define the social landscape of Britain’s youth with their Mercury-winning debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.

2007: The band are back with Favourite Worst Nightmare, this time backed by stadium-sized riffs to underline their huge popularity.

2008: Alex joins pal Miles Kane on a sonic adventure so inspired, so grand in scale and ambition and so different from the Arctics that it confirms a rare talent indeed.

Merseysider Miles, also 22, met Alex when his old band The Little Flames toured with the Arctics. He later played some guitar on Favourite Worst Nightmare and he’s now with another indie guitar band The Rascals, yet to release an album.

As The Last Shadow Puppets, they occupy a world so distant from mardy bums, riot vans and flourescent adolescents.

On their album, The Age Of The Understatement, with its bold string arrangements, guitar twang and harmony vocals, it is incredible that Alex can divorce himself so completely from the Arctics.

Morrissey, Richard Ashcroft and Ian Brown have not managed his level of reinvention in the years they’ve been around. Perhaps only Damon Albarn (Gorillaz, The Good, The Bad & The Queen and Chinese opera!) has such an open mind.

Inspired by the classical, emotional, orchestral songs of Scott Walker (before he went all avant-garde), the pair decamped to rural France to a small studio overlooking pleasant fields and open skies.


The other key players were James Ford, Arctics producer also in Simian Mobile Disco, and Arcade Fire arranger Owen Pallet who led the 22-piece London Metropolitan Orchestra through the string parts.

It all begins with the handsome racket of the title track which gallops along like some American theme tune of the Sixties for a show in the spirit of Rawhide or Champion The Wonder Horse.

The accented voices of Alex and Miles take a bit of getting used to but such is the power, commitment and style of their singing it all begins to make perfect sense.

The siry Standing Next To Me summons the hopes, fears, joy, and pain associated with young love, carried along on a cloud of strings.

As you’d expect from an album involving the Arctics lyricist, there are plenty of acute observations and unexpected twists. The biting Separate And Ever Deadly finds them imploring “save me from the secateurs.” Where did that come from?

As it progresses, I’m struck by what a celebration of youth this album is, the players, the themes, the delivery.

It’s as if they’ve taken their cue from music of 40 years ago but made something contemporary without ever sounding like pale imitators of Walker or their other inspirations David Bowie and David Axelrod.

With the notes of the wistful, understated closer The Time Has Come Again — another song about young love, the voices at their most naked — I felt in danger of making it “the age of the overstatement” as far as this album is concerned.

The Mirror's album review

Review: The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age Of The Understatement

4/5

Although he can’t get out of his front door for gold discs and Brit Awards, Arctic Monkeys main man Alex Turner has not forgotten his less handsomely rewarded pal, Miles Kane.

The pair forged an unbreakable relationship on the Arctics’ first tour when Miles’ former band The Little Rascals provided support.

The Turner and Kane bond was further strengthened when, despite their age (they are both 22), the pair found common interest in the lovelorn orchestrations and gallant sophistication of 1960s pop.

With Scott Walker’s solo work and the mariachi-bolstered psychedelic pop of 60s/70s cult band Love the key reference points, The Age Of The Understatement is a striking collaboration.

Sonically, a world away from either the Arctics or Rascals, it’s an album that sets out the pair’s stall as keen students of the past. But their own intense, youthful, high energy and songwriting skills ensure this is no mere retro exercise.

Like Turner’s more melodic hometown godfather, Sheffield veteran Richard Hawley, TLSP uncover a vanished world and inject it with contemporary insights. Locked together in perfect harmony, the pair are vocally inseparable.

“I can still remember when your cities smelt exciting”, begins the wry but rueful Calm Like You, a song soon filled with typically Turneresque intrigue.

Adding to the widescreen epic feel, drummer/producer James Ford ups the tempo with thrilling, heart-pounding patterns which

give the string arrangements added zest, while Kane’s guitar, heard to searing effect on the Arctics’ Favourite Worst Nightmare, delivers several knotted, thorny solos, notably on Black Plant – a fine merger of Sheffield steel and Scouse ingenuity

The Puppets are sussed, suave operators. But understated? Hardly. It’s a rip-roaring journey to the heart of a city where dirty realism and gaudy myth live side by side.

Short documentary about the album
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_OXtNpcWmJc

Live on Jools Holland
Age of the Understatement

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyK79PHTiKw

In My Room
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0nmVeM4lx0

 

[DiamondSea]

amforum

 

[DiamondSea]

The NME's album review

The Age Of The Understatement

8/10

In the lottery, right, and what’s the first thing you do? You book all your mates on the first flight to Mauritius, buy a speedboat full of beer and spend a month living like James Bond’s layabout twin brother, obviously. And so it was for Alex Turner, his musical numbers having resoundingly come up. As frontman with Arctic Monkeys he can do whatever the hell he wants, so naturally he grabbed his mate Miles Kane from The Rascals, phoned up Strings-U-Like to order their finest 22-piece orchestra and buggered off to France for a fortnight to make a half-hour Scott Walker record. Who wouldn’t?

On first impressions, the entire Last Shadow Puppets concept seems like a right good lark; a throwaway wheeze or a flippant vanity project from an indie star presented with every opportunity rock has to offer and keen to give a mate a leg-up, an extravagant wine-tasting holiday well spent. Certainly, the record boils over with the sheer fun of its own making: galloping violins sweep and swoon as if they’re auditioning for the Las Vegas production of Phantom Of The Opera, producer James Ford hammers out stampeding lounge beats on the drums and Alex’n’Miles swap harmonies like Eurovision lovebirds from 1972. Charming and cheesy in equal measure, having eagerly glugged down the breezy pop bluster of the title track – a natural progression from the Monkeys’ ‘Do Me A Favour’ that seems to have jumped out of ‘Favourite Worst Nightmare’ eager to stretch its string wings – you wonder if they’ll get away with stretching their Yorkshire Bacharach shtick to a full album.

Thrillingly, it turns out they do. What could have ended up as a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of late-’60s orchestral lounge pop zips, rattles and crashes by like an impassioned and über-modern homage to St Scott’s stately showmanship and Ennio Morricone’s trembling spaghetti western tensions. Widescreen, billowy and bombastic these arrangements may be, but there’s no room for camp orchestral flam. Most tracks are kept to a trim two and a half minutes and are delivered with a brittle bite and energy rarely heard in such antiquated styles, last handled with any sort of flash, ferocity and threat by early period Tindersticks. When the likes of Marc Almond, Elvis Costello or (ugh) The Divine Comedy try this sort of class-grasping trick it sags and sours into a mush of copyist nostalgia; here, dotted with nods to Bloc Party’s ‘Banquet’ (‘Only The Truth’), The Zutons’ ‘Havana Gang Brawl’ (‘Black Plant’) and the parpy organ sounds that The Horrors nicked off The Sonics (‘Separate And Ever Deadly’), it sparkles afresh. Possibly smirking mischievously, Kane and Turner have clambered inside their parents’ favourite records and spray-painted their names into the liner notes; for old music, it sounds remarkably, ridiculously new.

It’s scratched out most boldly on ‘I Don’t Like You Any More’, ‘…Understatement’’s defining track. A grandiose classical refrain full of weeping strings gives way to a brooding verse of wobbly sinister synths before the fuzzbox cranks up and Miles – the hungry, snarling apprentice to Alex’s assured master craftsman – spits a bilious punk bastard rock chorus of fatally fractured romance (pretty much the over-riding theme of the album) that feels like an out-of-control oil tanker crashing through the Royal Opera House stalls. If this is TLSPs’ most blatant pissing over the red ropes of the lounge pop museum, elsewhere they debase their materials more reverently. ‘Black Plant’ flick-knifes between skating Avengers strings and slicing organ blarps like a vomiting Mysteron; ‘Separate And Ever Deadly’ is locked in a tango to the death with Jacques Brel’s ‘Jackie’; ‘Calm Like You’ paints a sneer across the rousing chops of ‘Delilah’ and ‘My Mistakes Were Made For You’ is what ‘Scott 2’ would have sounded like if they’d hired in the funky drummer bloke from The Charlatans.

Having run rampage through pop’s most velveteen vault for 28 minutes, however, it’s on the closing salvos of ‘Meeting Place’ and ‘The Time Has Come Again’ that TLSP most perfectly recapture the grace and glory of their influences. The former’s a taut and refined ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’ for the post-new rave generation, full of angelic choirs with violins and trumpets floating down waterfall-festooned spiral staircases; the latter a plaintive ballad, Turner strumming and plucking his way through the fallen confetti and sodden streamers at the ballroom party’s end. “You stood between a fraying scene” he mutters mournfully, like the last extra left to clean up after a Busby Berkeley movie. Incredible.

For a two-week lark between mates, The Last Shadow Puppets is an awesome achievement – a modern reinvigoration of an archaic, dead musical language. We pray TLSP don’t turn into Alex’s Raconteurs – a second album in the same vein would be utterly superfluous, maybe do skiffle next time lads. With news of a new Noel/Weller record on the horizon, the lack of self-indulgence and predictability displayed here is a beacon of good sense in the ****-sniffing world of ‘collaboration’ ego-wanking. But an ‘…Understatement’? Oh, anything but.

 

[DiamondSea]

arcticmonkeysfrance

 

[DiamondSea]

MTV2 Subterranean video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wguAN-kRzzA

Magic Rpm interview
Part one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGIJ-4Ifowo&feature=related

Part two
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0J63SgfI8M