The sound of selling out isn’t a minor note. No. If anything, it’s a major chord blazing loudly, overproduced, polished, and clean, practically  on the front page of a magazine. When musician’s “sell-out” and their music changes, our disdain for the new sound is for an accumulation of reasons. We’re blinded by nostalgia, sure, but there’s also those extra hands on the soundboard, label changes, and more producers demanding a certain sound. With all of that, it’s no wonder there can be dissonance between the early music in a band’s discography and more recent work.

The Arctic Monkeys are a prime example of this, and so, I’ve decided to pick on them. Yes. They’re one of the highest rollers we still herald as “indie darlings” so they get the first kiss of death. With their carefully styled hair and black leather jackets, they look more-suave and sophisticated than ever before.

But was “before” really that bad?

Sure, front man Alex Turner was a waif with a shaggy bowl-cut and poorly fitted clothes, but the image (or lack-there-of) and its subsequent resonance with their old music was anything but sloppy. Image wasn’t an issue. Free from the sleek clutches of monetization, their music was allowed to simply breathe.

A notable sound and direction borne out of this space was their sixth album, produced back in 2011, entitled Suck It and See.

While the album is far from being devoid of innuendo, its title is just a turn of phrase from the U.K. which means: Give something a try (unlike what the U.S. market thought of it at the time, and went so far as to put stickers over the labeling for it’s supposed “vulgarity”). Its cover shows nothing more than a cream-colored background with the title printed in small, inconspicuous letters. In fact, with all its subtlety, one might mistake it for a book cover if it weren’t printed on the standard square vinyl cover.

But does that make the album and its music inherently “bad,” a poorer man’s version of the less-budget conscious big hits they produce today?

If anything, it might just make it better.

The album in question has the sheer opposite of the “bad boy, super masculine, girls and fast cars…” front they have currently going on for their most recent albums, AM, and Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino. Which, I don’t know about you, was such a nice difference. There was no promise of grand romance, adventure, or misogyny, and with low expectations, it seemed anything was possible.

Even the cover, for all its simplicity, works. It doesn’t give anything about what’s inside away. It promises nothing and asks for nothing from the listener in return.

Musically, we’re treated to guitar solos that enchant and swim, psychedelically so. The Jauntiness of the instrumentals on “Library Pictures” and “Don’t Sit Down Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair”  juxtapose well with the soothing and hazy strumming on “Love is a Laserquest” and “The Hellcat Spangled Shalala.” Tambourines and twinkling bells galore fill out the background, but never enough that they overdo it. Rather they give the music a dreamy, shoe-gazing quality one might feel lying on a beach under midday sun.

Anyone I’ve talked to seems to have glossed over this album completely, telling me, “Favorite Worst Nightmare was a great old one of theirs, very solid” (which is a debatable statement) or simply think I’m bringing up something vulgar at the mere mention of the title. Critics were varied (ah, but aren’t they always?) But to give an indication of where it was headed, The A.V. Club gave it a C-  and Entertainment Weekly gave it a B-. While Pitchfork gives it moderately better rank at 7.5 out of 10 the general consensus still sound like my review should say “the album was forgettable at best.”

But it’s not. After all, when something is quieter does that make it, by definition, worse? 

Lyrically the album can be seen as far superior to its successors There are no redundant chorus’ that ask “Why’d you only ever call me when you’re high?” and “Are you mine?” and “Do I Wanna Know?” Eradicated were the cliches and instead replaced with “Your love is like a studded leather-headlock, your kiss it could put creases in the rain, you’re rarer than a can of Dandelion Burdock, and those other girls are just Post-mix Lemonade…” and “A pussyfooting setting sun-make a wish that weighs a tonne-there are no handles for you to hold- and no one understands where it goes…”

Maybe that’s where part of its hidden charm comes from. It’s not one-note, but multifaceted. While each song certainly deals with infatuation, it treats it as less of an obvious, and more of an exploration in both fascination and romance, confusion and indigence, that unfolds before the listener in a subdued narrative style.

In fact, part of me wonders if this was lyricist and lead singer Turner’s attempt at writing poetry, scrambling it a bit, and then setting it to music. Like the line from the titular song says: “I poured my aching heart into a pop song, I couldn’t get the hang of poetry.” 

It seems then, much like the title itself, we’ve misconstrued some of the meaning behind the validity of the band and this album. Whether lost to personal bias, “making it big” or a combination of both, it’s important to remember you can’t go back and change a band. There are no time machines to un-sign a band from a record label and stick them back in the underground scene. Instead, you can only search through their older music in hopes to find hidden gems. So to save some of the wear and tear from that search, here’s my recommendation: the next time you go to scoff at “those Beatle rip-offs with the repetitive chorus,” pick up Suck It and See and don’t listen to the sound of what is, but rather what it was at one time. Allow the possibility of a sound organic and pensive, hesitant and surreal, to play, and  you might just come away from listening to it saying, “Damn, I miss their old sound even though I just discovered it today.”