The Age of the Understatement (Domino)

This ballsy collaboration between Arctic Monkey Alex Turner and Miles Kane from the Rascals gets props for good taste. But in trying to riff on Scott Walker’s golden ’60s period as an easy-listening crooner, the two young British frontmen fall seriously short of the perverse genius that made Walker so stimulating. The title track sets the mood, with bellicose drums, galloping strings, and an all-male chorus of basso profundo Cossacks: all the production tropes you’d expect from one of Walker’s merrily camp exercises in cinematic po, but, sadly, the form dominates content.

Owen (Final Fantasy) Pallett’s orchestrations are wonderful, but to what end? Turner’s wit shines inside the narrower and less ambitious context of the Arctic Monkeys, where he can deploy his considerable gifts for dry sarcasm. But lacking Walker’s erudition, or even the artsy pretensions of David Bowie (also name-checked in the accompanying press), Turner’s lyrics here are mostly tentative, shapeless, or toothless. He coughs up some punchy lines in the tango-shaped “Separate and Ever Deadly”, and “In My Room” is a reasonably effective hymn to self-loathing, but we’re mainly left to wonder what he’s on about.

Musically, things are just as iffy. A twist in the vocal melody of “Standing Next to Me” leaps out as if Burt Bacharach suddenly grooved into the room, and the breezier moves of “The Meeting Place” work beautifully, as do the spine-tingling vocal harmony and harrumphing tuba that appear in the dying seconds of “Black Plant”. But too little about The Age of the Understatement is remarkable, beyond the fact of its existence, and that’s just not enough.