Orchestral Pop, the Way It Was (More or Less)

Everyone has a different version of the 1960s, especially those who weren’t born at the time. Alex Turner, who leads Arctic Monkeys, and Miles Kane, from the Liverpool band the Rascals, both 22, reach for their own anachronisms as the songwriters and guitarists in the Last Shadow Puppets, who played their first full United States concert on Thursday night at the Manhattan Center’s Grand Ballroom.

The Last Shadow Puppets don’t care about garage-rock, psychedelia, Merseybeat or other well-trodden revivals. Their fixation is the way the 1960s warped orchestral, cinematic pop. In the studios of Hollywood and the British film industry, in movie soundtracks and in radio hits, pop moved from Tin Pan Alley urbanity to more eccentric chronicles, while it added reverb-drenched rock guitar to symphonic strings and horns. The properly arranged and rehearsed forces of studio musicians were deployed on new, stranger missions.

At the Grand Ballroom the Last Shadow Puppets merged a rock band with a dozen strings and a horn section, approximating the full production of their album, “The Age of the Understatement” (Domino).

Their songs are appropriately dramatic, often tales of tragic romance, desperation, betrayal and estrangement, ready for the magnified emotions and artifice of the larger group. “Before this affection ferments/Kiss me properly and pull me apart,” they sing in the album’s title song.

The Last Shadow Puppets are closer to the 1960s-flavored new wave of the Rascals than to the crisp, jagged post-punk of Arctic Monkeys. But as collaborators, Mr. Turner and Mr. Kane are even more retro.

In good period style, the songs shifted among waltz, rock and quasi-Latin rhythms. Both guitarists sent reverbed notes billowing over arrangements where soundtracks met pop-rock. There were galloping spaghetti-western drums out of Ennio Morricone and suave, spacious spy-movie undercurrents echoing John Barry; there were bustling tremolos and airborne countermelodies for the strings.

There were also direct homages to the late-’60s Los Angeles band Love, including both a remake of Love’s remake of the Burt Bacharach-Hal David song “My Little Red Book” and the Last Shadow Puppets’ own “Standing Next to Me.” Since their lone album runs only 35 minutes, the group also brought other people’s songs: the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” David Bowie’s “In the Heat of the Morning” and Leonard Cohen’s “Memories.”

The Last Shadow Puppets’ own songs aren’t pure period pieces. Written in the wake of punk, many of them are packed with words and more pressured than their models. Mr. Turner and Mr. Kane can’t easily return to the pace of their chosen era. Nor do they want to.

“I Don’t Like You Any More” switched between brooding, waltzing minor-key verses and frantic, near-punk ones. The transition was the distorted sound of Mr. Turner’s guitar, starting as reverb and building to the precise verge of feedback, elongated and swelling as the other instruments went silent. As smart and premeditated as the rest of the music, it also held the potential for cacophony and chaos, lurking just outside the Last Shadow Puppets’ chosen forms.