The Beat Surrender

Come on be honest, if you are anything like me (and i’m pretty sure at least some of you must be…surely i’m not alone in this cruel world!) then you must have been a little bit worried about the return of the Arctic Monkeys.

They have pretty much everything going against them this time out where as on their first outing the odds were beautifully stacked in their favour. I know if I was a big gambler rather than a small time occasional flutter guy, then my money would have been on one of two things happening with the second album. The first would be a radical change of direction and it being a disaster, the second would have been them trying to knock out version two of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.

You couldn’t have blamed them either could you if they’d followed either of the two paths above. After all how do you follow up the fastest selling debut of all time in the UK? How do you keep your huge army of fans happy, yet also appease the British music press with their insatiable appetite for building up bands on the first album before knocking them down on the second. More importantly though as a young band, how the hell do you follow up something so good with an album that you’ve made on your own terms.

Somehow though they have pulled it off pretty much as perfectly as you could have reasonably expected in the circumstances. Your Favourite Worst Nightmare has flashes of the old album, If You Were There, Beware and Balaclava to name but two, but it shows real signs of a band flourishing (despite the pressure) and producing the album they very definitely wanted to make. I heard Alex Turner say that it was only at this point in the bands career that they could risk making this album and he’s probably right. It’s harder, it’s faster and it might lose the odd fan along the way, but it’s not a radical departure.

The single Brianstorm gave a good indication of what to expect, it’s frantic and fraught, the drums are insanely fast (Helders has taken up boxing to help him keep up with the drumming required on this album), it’s also got a real snarl to both the lyrics and the guitars. It’s the same again on Teddy Picker and thats the first two tracks on the album, you don’t really get any breathing space until you get to Only Ones Who Know which is track six and the final song 505 , which is the most beautiful and weary sounding song the band have ever written in my opinion. I’ll be amazed if Fluorescent Adolescent isn’t a future single, if it wasn’t for the language then i’d probably also tip This House Is A Circus to make it on it’s own right.

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