On Monday, the Arctic Monkeys sold 118,501 copies of their debut album in the UK, more than the rest of the top 20 combined. It’s a startingly high figure not just because they’re set to be the Biggest New Band Since Oasis but because of the speed with which they’ve gatecrashed their nation’s public consciousness, going from unknown indie band to No. 1 on the singles charts in roughly six months. Much of the credit for that quick rise is rightly given to the power of the internet: The then-unsigned band first caught the public ear when its demos circulated last year. The Sheffield quartet eventually signed with Domino and the label wisely hosted the buzzmaking tracks, a move that allowed anticipation for the group's studio recordings to spread rather than stall. Two No. 1 singles, a few breathless reviews, and a load of thinkpieces about how The Internet Will Change Music Forever later and in the UK the Arctic Monkeys are suddenly the biggest band of the decade.
It would be nice to think that a democratized music industry would mean the kids are tossing up alternatives to what they're already getting, but the Arctic Monkeys are, at their heart, the same sort of meat’n’potatoes guitar rock that has dominated the UK since the emergence of the Strokes, if not Oasis. They’re a band that neatly sums up what’s already selling, and in a relatively condensed media market the group was always going to be a hit; what’s changed is that they were pegged quickly, mainlined to their target market and the UK mainstream press and radio for six months, then called an organic success story. (America, don’t get smug: Your biggest download success to date is “My Humps.”) And context still matters: When Oasis or the Strokes rolled into town, they were breaths of fresh air, antidotes to a lack of swagger or hooks or artists who wanted and deserved to be rock stars; Arctic Monkeys are yet another in a string of buzzsaw guitar bands with Northern accents.
What’s meant to be different about them are sometimes keenly expressive lyrics and that irresistible backstory. The band’s more starry-eyed backers compare their hardscrabble tales to those of predecessors such as the Specials, Smiths, Pulp, and the Streets. But wringing lyrics from the everyday or articulating the dissatisfaction of many is risky and difficult business and, unlike those listed above, the Monkeys aren’t so much spinning deft tales of quotidian anxiety as just complaining about their first steps into nightlife, run-ins with bouncers, cops, and schoolmates. So they’re the UK’s emo, painting diaristic portraits of small-town and suburban life for teens in a country where fundamentalism is allegiance to a soccer club rather than religion.
Hey, fair play to them—first steps into nightlife, run-ins with bouncers, cops, and schoolmates, these should be the worries in their lives, and of their peers they’re among the best at addressing them. Almost everything that’s appealing about Arctic Monkeys is down to singer Alex Turner, who possesses a gritty voice that gets increasingly appealing the more he allows it to stretch and wander. On sharp, observational, and detail-heavy Saturday Night and Sunday Morning tracks like the “Red Lights Indicate Doors Are Secure,” “Mardy Bum,” and “Riot Van” the band justifies taking their album name from the kitchen-sink drama. (Though it’s still terrible—alas, Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down was already taken). Outside of naming their record, when the band stumbles it’s typically when they’re fumbling around with women (“Dancing Shoes,” “Still Take You Home”) or complaining about the onset of fame (the dreadful “Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong But...”).
The singles are a mixed bag. The Five Minutes With... EP’s “Fake Tales of San Francisco” is a witty call to arms, a plea for bands that say something about their lives, but “From the Ritz to the Rubble”’s whining almost makes you want to side with the bouncers. Of the Monkeys’ starmaking tracks, neither sounds like a No. 1, let alone the first sounds from a burgeoning sensation: “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor” grates every other time I listen to it; better is the offbeat “When the Sun Goes Down,” the only track here that’s three-dimensional structurally as well as lyrically. Should the band release album closer “A Certain Romance” as its next single, the hit/miss ratio will be greatly improved. A long sigh about living among chavs, “Romance” finds the Monkeys moving between bloody-knuckled and wistful as they paint a picture of boredom breeding violence, of being aware of the faults and faultlines in their environment but feeling too powerless or hemmed in by loyalty to raise a fuss. It’s a neat summation of both the band’s M.O. and a teenage life characterized by existential drift and geographic claustrophobia.
And in the end then this is about teenage life—and a pretty specific type of teenage life at that. NME editor Conor McNicholas told The Guardian last year that “there’s a big sofa supermarket by Doncaster train station. I always look at it and think someone’s got a Saturday job there, they’re 17, they’re stuck in Doncaster and they fucking hate it—that’s the person we're publishing for.” I’d guess that to a disaffected, chavbaiting 17-year-old from Doncaster (or Rotherham, or Hull...) this is the perfect soundtrack to moving loveseats around a stock room. Fittingly then the NME awarded this album a 10/10. To the rest of us, however, the album is at times charming, oddly affecting, and certainly promising but understandably something less than life changing.
