The Last Shadow Puppets - 'The Age Of The Understatement'

There’s nothing understated about the The Last Shadow Puppets. They – Alex Turner and Miles Kane – arrive with the level of expectancy you would anticipate the side project of an Arctic Monkey and his best friend to have. While for Kane, TLSP is a good outlet to promote his day job (The Rascals), for Turner it seems to be a way of proving he’s more than just a good social commentator. “And she threw a feather boa in the road as if she thought it would set the scene,” he sings at one point on debut single ‘The Age Of The Understatement’. And it hardly sounds like he’s referencing your average Sheffield female when he says that she looked “endearingly bedraggled in the wind” either.

As you might hope it would, this over precociousness doesn’t stop with the lyrics. Instead of sounding like an Arctic Monkeys-meets-Rascals hybrid, LOTSP are actually what happened when Muse met the Royal Philharmonic: all galloping drumbeats, Telstar orchestration and operatic vocals. You certainly can’t accuse the pair of playing it safe, but you could certainly accuse them of trying to be just a bit too clever.

Released 14/04/08 on Domino.