Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (Arctic Monkeys)

Arctic Monkeys
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
Epic Records
Rating: 8

You can almost feel sorry for Franz Ferdinand. Two years in the limelight and barely three months since being described as UK's biggest rock band in Rolling Stone, the spotlight has shifted back from Glasgow to Sheffield.

It wasn't supposed to end up this way, of course. How could a name as exotic as Alexander Kapranos be displaced by one as homespun as Alex Turner? After all, by the route that most indie rock bands, however talented they are, travel, the Arctic Monkeys, consisting also of fellow Sheffieldians Jamie Cook, Andy Nicholson and Matthew Helders, were supposed to end up playing in some dinghy English pub every weekend to an audience of fifty indie hipsters. Heck, for lads who first picked up a guitar and drumsticks barely three years ago as Christmas presents, a crowd of fifty is a novelty!

But then, the world wide web came into their life. Even without Myspace.com, the Monkey's demo tapes, were released onto the internet, under the equally unostentatious title of Beneath The Boardwalk and eventually Britain got tired of lyrics pertaining to passions in the dark corridors of an art school and woke up to the reality that every British male faces at the age of eighteen, that of a night of non-stop partying and "dancing to electro-pop like a robot from 1984/from 1984".

If the likes of Oasis and Blur, perpetrators of Britpop never really touched teenage give-it-to-me-funkier-and-faster guitar rhythms, somehow their predecessors from a decade later managed to perfect it. From their first professionally-recorded song, the infectious "Fake Tales of San Francisco" to the British #1 hit, "When The Sun Goes

Down", the jocular lament at the exploitation of girls of the night by their pimps, most songs within the album clock in before three minutes, leaving the album's tones resonating before forty five minutes has passed.

Of course, there are disruptions in that ride and although album sales show otherwise, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not lacks the rugged yet somehow still polished sounding Definitely Maybe whose sales record it broke in the Monkey's homeland. "Riot Van" is a whine, best left to emo bands, about police authority that even Zach De La Rocha would be ashamed off, while the My Chemical Romance-esque title of "Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong But…" acts as an excellent forewarning to a rather distasteful track.

Yet, the mousey-haired Turner, recently voted the coolest person on the planet by British youths, is endowed with the same slur in his voice that the likes of Kapranos and Cobain possess in abundance. It is a voice that's wailing for attention in a very subtle way, although unlike Kurt, Turner's gripes are more about British life and chavs, as compared to ghost in his head, and backup vocalist Helders rounds up the wry lyrics with a voice that keeps the clever songwriting not only respected by hipsters (how do you beat "and all the weekend rockstars are in the toilets/practicing their lines") but top 40 connoisseurs as well. Somehow, the four young men who are barely in their twenties have managed to put out an introductory album that stands proudly as a fete to working class England.

It seems just like plebeian Oasis, manifested in a different form as the Sheffield boys versus the artsy Blur's siblings Franz Ferdinand all over again. Regardless of whether which band is reduced from "ritz to rubble", the "view from the afternoon" is a promising one and this time, the hype isn't altogether off.

Kristiano Ang is the Publisher of Vainquer Magazine (www.vainquer.net), Asia’s rock magazine for the world. Residing in Singapore, he has profiled and interviewed the Black Eyed Peas and Good Charlotte.

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