Arctic Monkeys Favourite Worst Nightmare

The first single from Favourite Worst Nightmare, "Brianstorm", is what the British like to call a corker. A tumult of drums and boiling guitar that seems to get faster with each successive listen, it's a kick in the arse to anyone counting on a swift decline for Sheffield's Arctic Monkeys after a phenomenally successful debut last year. And the first half of Favourite Worst Nightmare is just as good or better, not to mention funkier, than that debut. When everything hits just right ("Fluorescent Adolescent", "The Bad Thing"), and vocalist Alex Turner's viciously funny lyrics fuse perfectly with the band's cheerful revisionism–handed down to them by the Libertines and the Strokes–it goes some way toward justifying the hype, or, in this case, sparing the Monkeys from the increasingly ludicrous attrition of other U.K. buzz bands. (The British used to send their kids off to die in wars. Now they give them record deals.) Turner is the secret weapon. The north of England is where sarcasm is elevated to an art form, and his acute verbal diarrhea is a wonder to behold. Sadly, Arctic Monkeys simply can't drum up enough compelling musical ideas to compensate whenever Turner switches his mouth off in the annoying stretches of the would-be epic, "If You Were There, Beware", or when, in the melancholy "505", he attempts a mood besides bleakly hilarious. In the spirit of the anagrammatized song titles that appear when you load the disc into iTunes, these parts of Nightmare are unforgivably nob rig.

Georgia Straight, April 2007