#tranquil please

[perfectly-clear-from-here]

tranquility base hotel + casino concept ads because i love this album more than anything and i have an incurable urge to create:

inspired by!!: x - x - x

[cosssmicthing]

lookit. idk how to draw donnie, but slowly i am learning and building strength and knowledge. i will become so powerful one day that my tmnt drawings will be off the charts, you’ll be like “wow that’s so cool, this artist is actually amazing and sexy and powerful.” and i will be humble and thank you

i forgot to plug myself on my last post, but i have an instagram im trying to start fresh on called cosssmicthing (who woulda thunk), im way more active there and i only have two followers, so feel free to follow me there :)

[analog-television]

PAIN AND SUFFERING FOR ONE BILLION YEARS (having super ultra niche special interests that no one else shares)

[nicoscheer]

From the Arctic Monkeys YouTube film- warp speed chic

[depressedraisin]

i wish there was more serious discourse abt how everything you’ve come to expect walked so that tranquility base and now the car could run :((

so, so much of what’s going on in tbh&c and the car, both musically, lyrically and thematically can be traced back to this album (or even tatou if u poke deeper). like how did ppl listen to eycte and then get shocked when alex put out something like tbh&c; if you’d been paying attention you would have known where’s it coming from. it’s such an important album in alex’s personal discography and marks a huge turning point in his evolution as a songwriter. i will also go far as to any analysis of the arctic monkey’s musical evolution is incomplete without talking about eycte. but so many ppl, i see, often just write it off as as “fun side project alex did during his break” OPEN YOUR EYES Y’ALL

[sculpturesofanythinggoes]

Arctic Monkeys’ Discography: [6/6] “Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino” (2018)

“Sitting at the piano took me immediately to a different place.” he says. “There are chords that came out, my fingers were falling different places, and the sounds were giving me ideas. That I was the guy sitting at the piano also gave me ideas.” Once Tranquility was done and Turner had landed back on his Lunar Surface, he was quick to task himself with a new project: designing the album’s artwork. A visionary who has a hand in all aspects of his work, he knew he wanted it to mirror, in some way, the album’s title. “I liked the idea of naming [the album] after a place, because to me records that I’ve been in love with and continue to be in love with feel like they’re places that you can go for a while. I very much feel like if [Born to Be With You] were a place I would’ve moved there a long time ago.” For the album’s name, he plucked the place mentioned on the would-be title track, the fictional Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, on which he sings of “Jesus in the day spa filling out the information form,” because, “That [phrase] seemed like the right name for this family of music.” From there, he began to think about architectural models and started sketching ideas on a piece of graph paper. “I liked this idea of a six-sided shape, because it was the sixth record,” he relates. “I drew a hexagon, I thought that was a kind of dumb idea, and then two months later I made this spinning thing on top of a Revox tape machine. In between that, there are a lot of things that aren’t the artwork and I made a real mess. But it all makes sense to me now. In the past I’ve definitely had record covers that don’t, to me, represent what’s on the wax, and I certainly don’t feel that way about this one. By the end of it, I think I’d forgotten there even was a record. I’d just gotten obsessed with cardboard.”

[kismetconstellations]

Christmas Eve with the Heelers in Verandah Santa

[antibayern]

keep remindin’ me that it ain’t a race when my invincible streak turns onto the final straight

FC Bayern München win the 2019-2020 UEFA Champions League (August 23, 2020)

[gayroman]

IF TRANQULITY BASE HOTEL AND CASINO WAS A MOVIE (DIRECTED BY ALEX TURNER)

unknown / reddit / the goldfinch by donna tartt / alex turner in tranquility base hotel and casino music video / 2001: a space odyssey directed by stanley kubrick / credit / sue zhao / blade runner 2049 directed by denis villeneuve / star treatment, arctic monkeys / warp speed chic / anyways, arctic monkeys / alex in tranquility base hotel and casino music video / sue zhao / warp speed chic / art and the future by douglas davis / the lovers (art installation), sneha solanki / the great gatsby by f scott fitzgerald / star treatment / alex turner in body paint music video / me and my dog, boygenius / ngc 2047 / unknown / unknown / unknown / alex turner photographed by matt helders (2018) / the last shadow puppets @ liverpool olympia, 02/04/2016 / crush by richard siken / sparkling spray of stars in ngc 2660 by nasa hubble / sleeping at last, saturn / the moon

Here he portrays himself as the director of a film. We can interpret that he means the whole TBHC album in its own right is a science fiction saga. Perhaps in some ways TBHC showcases stages of his life – certainly The Ultracheese which depicts past memories of lost friends, and One Point Perspective which refers to his crafted look of mysticism on stage whilst he also talks about a younger him dreaming of becoming a star. - genius annotation on anyways by arctic monkeys

STARRING ALEX TURNER AS THE LOUNGE SINGER

[ooops-i-arted]

Sniffling, wheezing, coughing from this sinus infection, now having gastrointestinal consequences of antibiotics, but BY THE FORCE I WILL BE IN THE THEATER WATCHING PHANTOM MENACE TOMORROW IN COSTUME

[leclerrari]

MONTREAL, QUEBEC: Charles Leclerc before practice ahead of the Grand Prix of Canada on June 16, 2023 (Photo by Jakub Porzycki)

[bylertruther]

kinda cool how in season one eleven escapes the lab thinking she's the monster & in season four eleven escapes the lab again knowing she never was and that none of what happened was ever her fault.

and how in season two she goes on a journey to figure out part of her past and is told by another of the lab's victims that she needs to find strength in pain and anger & in season four we saw that it was her mother calling her by her real, human name and telling her that she loved her that gave her enough strength to overpower evil and banish it from their dimension, not the hurt and rage she felt at her being taken away. and that again, she was able to perform a miracle and bring her friend back to life by thinking of the love she showed her and the way she had always treated her like she was a human being.

she and her story are just really cool, methinks.

[potatobugz]

me on my 53rd death in a row on some death wish level:

the game: PLEASE turn on peace and tranquility please for the love of god. take it. take the easy mode. please

[obessivedork]

TBH as a writer appreciating the set-up of a character I ADORE Vivienne but her lack of proper character arc & the inability to argue with her more is as infuriating as with most of your companions in DAI, if not more when you play a Mage because you CAN’T grab her by the shoulders and shake her and say Ma’am if you’d had worse luck and wound up literally anywhere other than the Circle you did wind up at you would be a fundamentally different person please for Maker’s sake admit out loud that you only like the Circles because you managed to etch yourself some limited social power out of the broken and corrupt system you might not otherwise have been able to get for yourself and therefore you have not suffered the true effects of it!!!!

[depressedraisin]

Parklife (1994) and Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino (2018): What does it mean to be an album of the times?

At face value Blur’s third studio album Parklife, released in 1994, and Arctic Monkeys’ 2018 release Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, their sixth, are very very very different albums. One the Britpop classic, the other a widely divisive experimentation -- they don’t even seem like they could hang out in the same sentence together. Then what the fuck am I on about?

Both albums are individually iconic in the respective band’s discographies -- with Parklife Blur conquered the heights of the Britpop war and firmly cemented its place in British music history while TBH&C marked a pivotal turn in style for the Monkeys, which in my very humble non-musician opinion, will make it historic sometime in the future. If you have spent as much time as I have overthinking the lyrics and pondering over interviews of another British rock band you are hyperfixating on though, you might see something more connecting these two albums. Written about 20 years away from each other, in wildly different times,  the two weirdly enough, have these faint threads tying in their themes and subject matters. 

Damon Albarn, the principal author of Parklife, described the album to NME as, “a loosely linked concept album involving all these different stories. It's the travels of the mystical lager-eater, seeing what's going on in the world and commenting on it."  Rings a bell? That’s extremely TBH&C coded! That one has often been called a concept album based on a luxury hotel and casino on the moon with various eccentric characters and their stories, wryly commenting on issues plaguing life in the 2010s. 

Parklife was a kind of a study of middle class English life of the mid-90s. With an extremely catchy pop soundscape and cheeky-cockney-laced lyrics about London parks and bank holidays, it became a quintessential symbol of Cool Britannia. They say the album never took off in the States because it was so British. In the years since, however, the band has described it more as sarcastic critique rather than a celebration of Britishness. Going through the lyrics with a fine toothed comb  with that in mind then, you can feel the impatience a bunch of 20s somethings were feeling with the ideal 9-to-5 picket fence lifestyle as well as exhaustion with the hedonistic decadence of youth in the backdrop of an unpopular Conservative-led economy in decline. A similar, if updated for 30 year olds in 2018, sentiment can be sensed in the absurd surrealism of the lyrics of  TBH&C. What do you do when you are fed up with tribulations of life and the ghosts of mistakes you’ve made along the way-- you fuck off and escape into whimsy of science fiction. 

The political context of the time when Parklife and Tranquility Base were released does matter. Opens up another perspective to reading the album.  It’s quite a stretch but bear with me.  

 The 90s in the UK began with Thatcher resigning and the Conservative government which dominated the 80s, becoming increasingly unpopular. There was a recession plaguing the early years of the decade. Britpop happened smack dab in the middle of this, and it was all about reacting to grunge and shoegaze and bringing back what is essentially British back to its music scene. Oasis, Suede, Pulp, Elastica (Justine Frischmann is the queen of Britpop btw) -- and ofcourse, Blur, were reviving guitar pop, singing in working class accents and about working class life and bringing back memories of the Swinging Sixties. Though each drawing from a wide variety of influences, these bands were becoming the face of a wider movement in music, art and youth culture.  The political scene took note.

In the mid-90s, the Labour Party led by Tony Blair quickly aligned itself with Britpop and Cool Britannia. Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn were being courted by politicians , label execs getting party membership invites, headlines went like “What’s the Story? Don’t vote Tory”. Britpop soon acquired nationalist undertones --- never forget Brett Anderson showing off his twinky waist with Union Jack in the background and “Yanks go home!” headline. 

By the end of the 90s, when Britpop had begun crumbling, the economy had recovered and Tony Blair was in Downing Street.

TBH&C and the Monkeys in general, perhaps have less political currency. When they burst onto the scene with their Sheffield accents and garage rock riffs in the generally stable pre-2008 economic climate, the Arctic Monkeys did occupy the space in British pop culture left vacant by Blur and Oasis in the wake of post Britpop, at least for a time. Their debut broke the record of being the fastest selling one, which used to be held by Elastica previously. The Monkeys were indie rock darlings in the UK and with 2013’s AM, became darlings in the US (and Tumblr) as well. Tranquility Base though, came out in a whole different world. 

2018 was a fucking atrocious time, to put it mildly. The world was in total freefall inching rapidly towards disaster, which ultimately culminated in the pandemic of 2020. Trump had been elected in 2016 and 2018 was arguably one of the peaks of his shitshow. Over in the UK, Theresa May and her Conservative Cabinet were deep in the quagmire of Brexit negotiations. (Gotta note that Turner has said he voted against leaving in the referendum. Albarn is of course, a very vocal critic of Brexit.) Right wing governments were coming into power everywhere it seemed like, the climate crisis took on a new sense of alarm among the larger public - and things only spiralled in the years following. I can’t think of another album which could accurately capture the sheer fatigue of seeing outrageous headline after headline, how desensitised we had all become, how disillusioned with life- in a mason jar like TBH&C has.   

That’s what makes an album legendary doesn’t it? You listen to it and immediately remember what living at the time was like. Even if 1994 was 10 years before I was born. 

Now that we have gotten that out of the way, let’s look at the two albums a little more closely. 

Some lyrics which give me very similar vibes: 

sexual hedonism // start treatment (tbh&c) and girls & boys (parklife)

mundanity of relationships // four stars out of five (tbh&c) and end of century (parklife)

the performativeness of middle class activism/social work // tranquility base hotel and casino (tbh&c) and parklife (parklife)

losing friends and losing touch // the ultracheese (tbh&c) and badhead (parklife) - now these aren't really similar, but i feel a connection. in my bones trust me bro. the whole "i'll grin and bear with it" thing about badhead is very reminiscient of the sense of insouciance about life that haunts tbh&c....almost??

the myth of america // the ultracheese (tbh&c), golden trunks (tbh&) and magic america (parklife) - magic america is making fun of reagan era the american dream while a disillusionment with the glitz and glam of life in la is pretty much consistent throughout tbh&c

a pathological dependence on technology as escapism // jubilee (parklife) and start treatment (tbh&c) - digital cameras and the internet and tvs were taking baby steps into invading our daily lives back in 1994, and by 2018 we were all fully under the vice grip of tech addiction. this parallel i find particularly funny so.

astronomical references // far out (parklife) and star treatment (tbh&c) - alex james, the blur bassist wrote and sung far out about his love of space. it's a pretty nice parallel hey.

For the last one, let's talk about Tracy Jacks from parklife. I couldn't really draw a direct parallel with a song from the other album, but that song spiritually fits right in I feel. An average Joe in the throes of a midlife crisis, teethering so so close to the edge and one day just snaps - that's a character one would expect dwells in the lounge of the Tranquility Base Hotel to drown themselves in the decadence and escape from all their shit, when all is said and done.

Now what's the concluding point of all this rambling. I don't know lolz. Y'all just read a thousand words of nothing.

Just kidding. Actually I read somewhere Damon Albarn was inspired by the 1989 novel London Fields, a science-fiction adjacent black comedy set against the backdrop of an impending nuclear crisis, while writing Parklife. That kinda rung a bell. (Yes, I did wonder if Alex has read this)

I just wanted to see if we can find any interesting connections parrallels or references between Parklife and Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino. I dunno if I've been successful in getting any point across, or it's just pointless waffling on. But one thing that did get confirmed to me once again, these two albums are really the Albums of Their Times. Captures the zeitgeist in such a specific but unique in their own ways, it's really wonderful.

And also studying the legacy and impact of AM with reference to other musical outfits is always fun. I think we can all safely say that AM is well on their way to capturing a seat in the pantheon of great British bands, where somewhere in a corner Blur also sits. Damon Albarn is a fucking legend of course -- from the pretty posh boy of Britpop he has gone to becoming one of the most versatile, experimental and prolific songwriter/composer in the contemporary music scene. He is apparently working on the music for an Goethe's fragmented libretto of Magic Flute Part 2. How many rockstars do you know have composed operas - how fucking dope. I wanna hope that we'll get to see Alex exploring crazy paths in music like this, he definitely has the potential. This whole exercise would probably have made more sense with one of Damon's post-Blur works, his first solo record Everyday Robots or even Blur's last album The Magic Whip, but I started this essay so had to finish it.

Maybe another day eh.

[dangerous-animal]

thinking about how the cure to tranquility is to have a spirit of faith summoned to touch you. have they tried other spirits or are faith ones just easiest to find because they are chantry centric?

i’m thinking different spirits would change the person somewhat

what if cassandra was different before her seeker training, and she was touched by the spirit of faith who made her just that much more faithful?

i need someone to write which spirit each mage companion would be approached by and how it would change them !!!!