Album Review: Everything You’ve Come To Expect

Everything You’ve Come To Expect is the The Last Shadow Puppets’ second album. For those of you who don’t know, The Last Shadow Puppets is the name of the side project from the Arctic Monkeys’ frontman Alex Turner and his indie-rocker friend Miles Kane. Both artists are successful in their own rights, and have developed the egos to match (given their behaviour in a recent interview). However, their popularity isn’t enough to make Everything You’ve Come To Expect sound like anything more than music born from boredom.

The opening track, ‘Aviation’, starts up in spectacular fashion, complete with sweeping strings and brilliant penmanship; unfortunately, the album goes downhill from here. The next few tracks are decent but don’t really bring anything new to the table, with Turner and Kane tending to recycle the same few themes, namely about the difficulties of being rich and famous.

Past Everything You’ve Come To Expect’s mid-point, the music sounds exhausted. Songs such as ‘Bad Habits’ and ‘The Dream Synopsis’ are shallow and forgettable. The pair are clearly talented – given their separate successes in other projects – yet here their skills fall flat. It appears that due to a lack of substance the music falls apart.