Sometimes I feel like music blogging is the 21st century’s answer to sailing for spices. For the last few thousand years humans have been constantly exploring new land and planting flags in new soil, satisfying that explorer’s itch. In the last few generations, however, this ability suddenly vanished as we ran out of new land and spices to discover. So our generation’s sea captains instead sit at their computers scouring music blogs and discussion forums or lurking at their local scene spot in v-neck shirts, desperately looking for some sort of new land to claim as their own. It doesn’t matter what you’re listening to as long as you were doing it 5 minutes before everybody else and you put up an mp3 or playlist to prove it. New is somehow always better, even when it’s not.

This is why it brings me a great ironic pleasure to write about the Last Shadow Puppets. Their album came out approximately 78 years ago in internet time (AKA 5 months). Their frontman Alex Turner is already an indie darling in The Arctic Monkeys, meaning the Puppets have already been milked of all their indie-cred before a single note was recorded. Conclusion: according to the internet you are not supposed to like this band right now.

So let’s make like Americans and reclaim this land as our own. This album is good, dammit: probably better than whatever obscure, non-released album you’re currently chasing. Turner and co-conspirator Miles Kane (of the Rascals) craft a 60’s throwback brit-style that has just enough modern upgrades to feel unique. Most immediate is the epic orchestration backing the tracks courtesy of Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallet. When combined with Kane’s vagabond guitar work you get the sensation of watching a James Bond movie directed by Sergio Leone. Balancing the whole affair is Simian Mobile Disco’s James FordSawyer from LOST? doing a damn fine job at production (and drums), deftly balancing the rough-edged intimacy of Turner’s vocals and Kane’s guitar with Pallet’s grandiose string arrangement.

“My Mistakes Were Made For You” is a slow draw of a track and the video suitably follows suit. Breaking away from his previous light excursions into yacht rock, Richard Ayoade here gives us a decidedly darker affair. At its core the video is a high concept performance piece: a bit of mystery and a slice of metaphor sandwiching a strolling Puppets performance. By design the video encourages you to simply listen to make sense of the visuals, making for a refreshingly subtle marriage or song and cinema. That said, while I admire the restraint, I still can’t shake the feeling that an even better clip might have resulted if Ayoade took the concept and solid cinematography already present and just fully ran with it. The final product is perhaps a bit too open-ended and opaque, never really clear on the nature of the tragedy that has occurred, leaving plenty of room to both spur the imagination and come off a bit pretentious. As the song says, “innocence and arrogance intwined.”