Alex Turner

Credit: AP Photo

“Submarine” certainly was a unique movie at Sundance, and with it came a similarly rare soundtrack.

Alex Turner, frontman for the Arctic Monkeys, headed up the charge with a handful of brand new solo tracks, and I can happily reveal when fans outside of film festivals can get a gander. 

“Submarine” soundtrack songs will be released digtally, under Turner’s name, on March 14 in the U.K., and in the U.S. some time during the same month, exact date TBA. It will be a “completely separate release than the new Monkeys album,” a spokesperson for Domino Records told HitFix. That would be the indie Co. behind the Arctic Monkeys’ music, publishing via EMI.

While its still unclear which songs will be on the as-yet-untitled set, Turner and the Weinstein company have a few to choose from: the tracks “Stuck on the Puzzle,” “Hiding Tonight,” “Glass in the Park,” “It’s Hard to Get Around the Wind” and “Piledriver Waltz” all made the cue. I smell EP.

UPDATE: In a release (2/7), Domino has given the effort a March 15 drop date in the U.S. The tracklist will include all six tracks mentioned.

[More after the jump...]

This would be Turner’s first, ehm, turn as a solo artist, all with the help of producer James Ford (who happens to moonlight as co-founder/member of Simian Mobile Disco). But don’t think big dance-rock affairs, or warped electro-freak numbers…

Turner sticks only to acoustic guitar and piano, his young voice a good tandem to the film’s teenaged protagonist. The latter spends much of his energy trying to court – and then sleep with – his new femme fatale-istic girlfriend and attempting to make his parents fall back in love. Gooshy stuff, very British (the story’s set in Wales) and funny as hell.

Stuff that Turner excels at, in his lyrical one-liners and swing zingers, like falling in love with “the polka dots type,” and “getting a pass into heaven” and needing a wristband. The loneliness, memories and sad spying-on-your-parents montages all get an equally lovesick score, thanks to the 25-year-old songwriter’s backing. Plus he looks suspiciously similar to lead actor Craig Roberts.

Meanwhile, the Arctic Monkeys themselves already confirmed that they were on for a new album to be released in 2011, which will be the follow-up to 2009's rockin' "Humbug" (produced by Ford, also). Turner may also be working again with Ford on another Last of the Shadow Puppets project, if Miles Kane is to be believed: the singer and former Rascals frontman said last year that the group was planning on another album together, on the heels of 2008's "The Age of the Understatement."