Answering the important questions…
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[6.56]
Alfred Soto: Drunk texting – the Monkeys have landed on a very modern crisis. Alex Turner hasn’t savored vowels so lubriciously since 2007, and he’s got a melody whose cadence rises and falls like a hip-hop track’s. The anonymous backing, however, could be anyone’s, including Lady Antebellum’s.
[6]
Iain Mew: The gloomy shuffle — gesturing to funk, but also gesturing to being too out of it to pull funk off — is a new sound for their singles, at least, and it works really well for this late night tale. Alex Turner spends much of the song haranguing himself in confusing second person and the title seems to misplace an apostrophe (unless it’s “Why Would You Only Call Me When You’re High?”), but the fogginess fits the scenario well enough for those to be positives.
[8]
Mallory O’Donnell: Their boyish exuberance always set them apart, and indeed set some people off. They’re no longer quite so boyish, but their propulsive clutter still bounces along just as nicely. Plus they’re asking the big questions here.
[6]
Anthony Easton: The guitar is still here, but the snarl’s a bit off. The work is a bit calmer or at least more tired. The negotiation between going out for a 3 AM booty call and staying in bed is a mark of some kind of adulthood, and they extend that into a metaphor for exactly what gets left behind in this age of extended adolescence.
[7]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Alex Turner, he of the meticulously detailed narrative, finds a way to paint a complicated relationship with less: “multiple missed calls”, “incapable of making alright decisions”, the title of the song. Subtext ahoy! “Why’d You Only Call” is conducted from within the drug smog rather than the morning after, and the band adeptly captures the wooziness of the situation. The lumbering bassline, the slow rise of paranoid backing vocals, the dramatic echo of duelling guitars as the song comes to a close — it’s all there and accounted for. The song even accepts defeat, or at least struggles with it, striking up parallels to the last great DUI (Dialing Under the Influence) tale, “Marvin’s Room” by Drake. Only this time, the protagonist faces comeuppance for hassling the woman of his interests: “You’re starting to bore me, baby.”
[8]
Patrick St. Michel: About as engaging as a song about being high and trying to organize a booty call should be.
[4]
Brad Shoup: While I clutch my cushions, waiting for a disco tune, I settle into a classically Arctic R&B tune. Turner shakes syllables like Sam Cooke; I disregarded the band back in the day, but now I get that Alex is a slinky thing, an impeccable karaoke freestylist working over masterly moody backings. The liberal use of falsetto puts it over.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: I should probably recuse myself. The advent of the Arctic Monkeys marked the precise moment at which I fell out of sympathy with modern rock, apparently forever. I’ve never been able to extend them the sort of patient, invested listening which turns generic music into unpretentious classicism, self-absorbed tendentiousness into revealing intimacy, and shoveling out one damn record after another into a modest string of unlikely classics. So while I’m able to mildly enjoy the tense chug of the guitar and bass and admire the Blurry strings, then Alex Turner’s mottled yell smears itself all over the track and I remember: that’s right, I dislike the Arctic Monkeys.
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: In a more than satisfying turn of events, the stodge has gone, replaced by slink and plink. It sounds as lithe as the lyricism, which asks for questions through various open ends rather than accidental knots. Is the protagonist finding clarity in a haze, or is it just temporary intoxication? The only certainty is that he’s encountering late night desperation. It’s a chapter in a story and it sounds like one too, especially after “Do I Wanna Know?” Of all the questions to be posited, the main is “where is the rest of the book?”
[7]