Leave Before the Lights Come On
Arctic Monkeys keep
right on going with "Leave Before the Lights Come On", a banging single with a
somewhat terrifying video featuring a strangely predatory way to meet people.
What puts these guys over the top for me is their sense of composition and
dynamics-- they don't just write a couple of chord progressions and call it a
song. "Leave Before the Lights Come On" is full of double stops and gaps that
throw Alex Turner's rough northern accent into sharp relief and sink the hooks
way in.
The song doesn't leave their familiar hook-ups-and-nightclubs territory, but it does move the plot a little further toward real adulthood, progressing from "This is a good idea/ You wouldn't do me if it wasn't one," to "How can you wake up/ With someone you don't love/ And not feel slightly fazed by it?" Underrated drummer Matt Helders has an uncanny knack for distinguishing the sections of a song by switching up the beat, and he's on his game here helping to prove that the Monkeys are capable of building depth and ambiguity into their laddish narratives.
The song doesn't leave their familiar hook-ups-and-nightclubs territory, but it does move the plot a little further toward real adulthood, progressing from "This is a good idea/ You wouldn't do me if it wasn't one," to "How can you wake up/ With someone you don't love/ And not feel slightly fazed by it?" Underrated drummer Matt Helders has an uncanny knack for distinguishing the sections of a song by switching up the beat, and he's on his game here helping to prove that the Monkeys are capable of building depth and ambiguity into their laddish narratives.