Arctic Monkeys
Turner’s eye is undoubtedly sharp. The album’s lead cut, “The View From the Afternoon,” deposits us on his home turf, a Northern England where the anticipation of Saturday-night thrills inevitably dissolves into a dumb, drunken blur of cash-gobbling fruit machines, maudlin late-night text messages, and lascivious taunts from wicked women leaning out limousine windows “in bunny ears and devil horns.” And the band’s tight, knotty postpunk, with its volatile, irregular rhythms and its tuneful guitars taking sour turns, is an ideal vehicle for his uncomfortably detailed observations. The Monkeys tidy up the Libertines’ slovenly jumbles, which shouldn’t work–imprecision is that band’s essence, with tunes emerging from the accidental cohesion of haphazard riffs. But Whatever replaces thrilling carelessness with an aggressive tension that keeps the sound lively. Its hard, jittery grooves are as unforgiving as the lyrics.
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Anyone singing that old tune is practically guaranteed an audience in the UK, of course, where mindless fun has been arousing suspicion at least since the rise of punk. But today’s wet-blanket bands lack the historical perspective, political commitment, or arty wit to imagine any alternative. Sometimes it seems they can’t imagine fun at all, mindless or otherwise. That failing was exemplified last year by the Kaiser Chiefs’ “I Predict a Riot,” which cast London as a lurid postmodern Gomorrah, overrun by track-suited goons and half-naked women–it was practically a parody of suburban paranoia about the evils of the big city. Turner inhabits just such a scene, and in the title of one Arctic Monkeys tune he declares that it’s missing “A Certain Romance.” In fact he uses the R word repeatedly throughout the album, though only to denote a vague concept he seems to define as little more than what drab everyday life lacks. The Monkeys flesh out that dissatisfaction with their thrashing, vigorous sound, and that may very well be good news for the future of rock ‘n’ roll. But that’s as far as the band gets–Turner can’t find a better use for his acute self-awareness than insisting he’s the smartest asshole in the pub.
Price: $12, sold out
