Arctic Monkeys Start American Tour with a Bang
Three albums into their career and still barely in their 20s, the Arctic Monkeys are dominating the charts and the magazine covers back home in England. Success has come more grudgingly in North America, but not for lack of effort.
Over the summer, the quartet played to a crowd of at least 50,000 at Lollapalooza in Grant Park. On Sunday, the band opened a North American tour at the Riviera before a considerably smaller, but no less enthusiastic audience of nearly 2,500.
As singer-guitarist Alex Turner walked on, the crowd pushed toward the stage. With his wiry frame packed into skintight jeans and hair cascading to his shoulders, Turner had his rock-star swagger in full effect; his slurred between-songs banter gave the impression that he’d started the show’s after-party a little early.
The 75-minute set saw the band trying to grow musically, pushing beyond the frantic tempos and machine-gun vocal delivery that characterized its first two albums. That sound — terse guitars, hopped-up exuberance and Turner’s witty twists and turns as a chronicler of night-life misadventure — produced two chart-topping releases, “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” and “Favourite Worst Nightmare.” When the band revisited the songs from those albums — “The View from the Afternoon,” “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” “Brianstorm” — the fans shouted back choruses and bobbed up and down like corks in a stormy ocean.
The concert’s most frantic moments were amplified by strobe lights and defined by Matt Helders’ furious drumming.
The percussionist did double duty as a backing vocalist, turning to shout into a microphone placed off his left shoulder so it wouldn’t interfere with his two-fisted assault.
He was by far the most animated band member on stage; the others hunched over their instruments beneath veils of hair, while the tour keyboardist hid beneath a hoodie.
