Last Shadow Puppets – Everything You’ve Come To Expect (Vinyl LP)

The Last Shadow Puppets returned in 2016 with their second album Everything You’ve Come To Expect. The album finds Alex Turner (Arctic Monkeys) and Miles Kane reunited with James Ford (production and drums), Owen Pallett (string arrangements) and Zachary Dawes (Mini Mansions) on bass, recording the follow up to 2008’s The Age Of The Understatement at Shangri-La Studio in Malibu.

Suffice it to say that other obligations came between The Age of Understatement and its sophomore successor, not least the unstoppable rise of Turner’s Arctic Monkeys, who released not one but three hugely successful albums between 2008 and 2013. Neither Kane nor Turner ever intended to put the Puppets on the back burner where so many “side projects” languish in perpepuity: the creative outlet that the act offered to the two friends was far too important for that.

Just as The Age of Understatement enabled the duo to explore an all-but forgotten world of epic ‘60s pop that contrasted starkly with the indie guitar-rock template of the Monkeys and the Rascals, so the second coming of the Last Shadow Puppets has given Kane and Turner new avenues that veer radically away from their other work. Everything You’ve Come To Expect is a more open and expansive work than its predecessor, wearing its influences less obviously on its sleeve – by turns the album is soaring, snarling and breathlessly seductive.

1. Aviation
2. Miracle Aligner
3. Dracula Teeth
4. Everything You’ve Come To Expect
5. The Element Of Surprise
6. Bad Habits
7. Sweet Dreams, TN
8. Used To Be My Girl
9. She Does The Woods
10. Pattern
11. The Dream Synopsis