How do you evaluate greatness? Can a faultless concert be simultaneously a frustrating concert? Do they have a future? Arctic Monkeys or only (splendorous) past? Can you be more cool than Alex Turner? All these questions followed one another in the little more than an hour and a half that those of Sheffield they touched on Kobetamenditurned into a happy and gigantic can of sardines with thousands of people delivered to those who became legends still with acne.
The problem of eating the world at 19 is what to do with the rest of your life. For eight years and five albums, from 2006 to 2013 and from ‘Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not’ to ‘AM’, Turner was clear: turn the Arctic Monkeys into the great group of rock of a generation and an era. He did it. He’s a genius for a reason. From there, things get complicated. A five-year hiatus, two middle-class albums (for them) and the uncomfortable feeling that their leader is having more fun alone, with Miles Kane or with Josh Homme (blessed always) than with his old school friends.
The Alex Turner that at 22.36 jumps on stage for the indisputable climax of this Bilbao BBKwhich will be followed by two nights in Madrid next week, years ago he stopped being the shy teenager who blew up the industry, He’s a superstar with sunglasses suit and hair that moves with absolute control of the scene, embraces the unexpected status of sex symbol that has acquired with age and generates the unconditional surrender of the public since it appears.
Also He’s a 37-year-old full-fledged guy who has already achieved everything and knows it. An artist facing maturity and who, perhaps, does not want to continue doing the same thing for another 30 years as at 20. Despite the fact that the concert is impeccable, driven by the playful atmosphere and in favor of work that reigns throughout the festival, there is something that squeaks slightly, a fly that buzzes in the back of your brain. There are more songs, professionalism and pure charisma than nerve and soul. Anyone who was lucky enough to see them on their 2013 tour, when they were at the absolute peak of ‘AM’, knows that the energy is not the same, like that liter of beer that half an hour after opening it, no matter how much you have tightened the cap, it has lost pressure. Not enough to not drink to taste, but enough to not be the same.
It is a problem that does not matter exactly when monuments such as ‘Crying lightning’, ‘Cornerstone’, ‘The view from the afternoon’ or ‘Do I wanna know?’ are played, masterpieces that are between offensive and amazing that almost a child wrote and they lead the public to a totally justified delirium, but add to the concert in stretches of discreet yawning when they attack, with limited impetus, the most recent songs. That bipolarity makes the concert oscillate between passing with honors and passing over and over again. The highs easily compensate for the lows, but doubts about the future of the monkeys remain floating in the air of the Bilbao night.