18.
Arctic Monkeys
Humbug

When I first got this, I was pretty disappointed. The new album by a band I love produced by the great Josh Homme (whom I love more): this was going to be an album of the year contender. What I got wasn’t quite what I wanted, and for a while I just decided it was crap. However, repeated plays have raised my estimation of it to the point where it makes a respectable appearance on the list at #18. The greatest strength of Humbug is also its greatest flaw. It’s quite a bit different from the first two Arctic Monkeys albums in many ways. Some of the same lyrical street poetry can be found, and occasionally the band breaks out into the spiky rock that I enjoyed so much from them before (see ‘Pretty Visitors’, which is a great track but really doesn’t belong here). For the most part, though, this is a much more ‘mature’ album, with the Yorkshire accents, musings on urban culture and the quick riffing all gone in favour of deeper, more meaningful lyrics underpinned by slower and more nuanced tunes. This album has as much in common with Alex Turner’s side-project The Last Shadow Puppets as it does with previous Arctic Monkeys records. It really had to happen – another album of the same would have had me complaining that they hadn’t changed at all, and that they had just rehashed previous glories. The down side is that I simply don’t like the new sound as much as the old. Still impressive and very enjoyable, though, and indicative of an adaptability which is commendable and suggests that they might be around for a while.