Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare (Album)

10:55am Thursday 26th April 2007

A LITTLE over a year since the record-breaking debut comes the Arctic Monkeys' 'tricky' second album.

And while Whatever contains songs about drinking in your local with your mates, girlfriends having strops and close encounters of the hammered kind on the dancefloor, Favourite Worst Nightmare is, sadly, a very different beast.

Alex Turner is undoubtedly a genius. His ability to capture snapshots of life in tight, clever couplets that fit 100 words into 10 is a talent unmatched by his contemporaries.

But the band's astronomical rise and critical acclaim and clamour has resulted in Favourite being dominated by songs about the music industry.

The excellent kick off single Brianstorm is a scathing assessment of some kind of record executive living large off his contacts.

While This House Is A Circus - one of the standout tracks in a relatively unspectacular collection - comes with the lines: "The more you open your mouth, the more you're forcing performance, all the attention is leading me to feel important (completely obnoxious), now that we're here, we may as well go too far."

But there are flashes of introspection. On 505, Mr Turner shows the kind of writing that graced Mardy Bum, A Certain Romance and The View From The Afternoon on their debut: "Not shy of a spark, a knife twists at the thought that I should fall short of the mark, frightened by the bite though it's no harsher than the bark, middle of adventure, such a perfect place to start."

However, musically it's much, much blander.

After a couple of spins there seems to be a lack of melody, a lack of genuine hooks (the aforementioned tracks aside) and anything memorable.

Think of the catchiness of Leave Before The Lights Come On, the humour of Red Lights Indicate Doors Are Secure and the self-deprecating character in You Probably Couldn't See - all of this is lacking, and all of this is what I enjoy so much about the Arctic Monkeys.

In context: If it wasn't for the dramatic success of its predecessor, I doubt this album would have anything like the impact expected.

But despite even this, they remain the most essential and exciting band in the country and no other release this year will be as eagerly anticipated on such a scale. They are possessed by the zeitgeist and that will carry them on to better things than this.