Albums 101. Whateve People Say I Am...

Christ it has been a while hasn't it?

What with me having exams and then the last week and a bit of suddenly being free and my foolish decision to make up for two months of non-partying all at once has kind of stopped me doing anything vaguely constructive.

Sorry about that and sorry to the lovely guys from Goodtime Boys who I chatted and hung out with at their London shows what seems like an age ago, I WILL write up that interview.

But for now an here is an old friend to get us started...


#.003 The Arctic Monkey, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not




Overview:

Music journalists love two things more than life itself: exaggerating and making lists. This album has indulged heavily in both these muso pastimes since its release. From before the first reviews it was heralded as a musical watershed, the kind of album that had the potential to spawn a whole generation of new, exciting bands. This album sat at or near the top off album of the year/decade lists with the same reverence that The Beatles get given by Rolling Stone magazine.

In truth, this album didn’t really create a new generation of British guitar bands. Milburn, Little Man Tate and The Rascals are more its’ legacy, which really doesn’t make it look all that important at a first glance. ‘Is This It’ and ‘Up The Bracket’ had already kicked the ‘rock’ scene up the arse and into gear, ‘Whatever People Say…’ is more one of the crowning achievements of the Garage Revival than one of its cornerstones. Maybe it’s because the ‘Monkeys, unlike the bands responsible for the albums above are neither defunct or a shadow of their former selves. They are still one of the best British bands out there, and they’re still progressing into an ever more interesting band.

However it did have one thing that no other band of the early to mid 2000s had, and that was huge UK commercial success. Becoming the biggest selling debut album of all time is not something to be sniffed at. This combined with the band’s sudden appearance and lack of drug addict members/celebrity girlfriends/bitter rivalry meant that suddenly, a British band was in the news for the right reasons, namely, the music. Just as everyone had heard of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana once ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came out, when the album’s lead single ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ hit the shelves, the Arctic Monkeys became a household name based on little more than good old fashioned song writing.

The Album:

It’s quite hard to know where to start when talking about the album itself. Most albums, even the best of the best, have ‘stand out’ tracks. ‘Whatever People Say…’ on the other hand is filled to the brim with tight, instantly recognisable songs that all stick in your ears like fresh chewing gum. With the possible exception of mid-album, mid-tempo ‘Riot Van’ there isn’t a single track below par on this album.

Part of this is driven by the wordplay. Not long after the album came out, BBC news did a piece on whether song lyrics can be considered poetry. Rather predictably they used a Bob Dylan lyric, but they also used the lyrics to ‘I Bet You Look Good…’. If that alone doesn’t indicate that perhaps the lyrics might be quite good, just give them a listen.

‘Stop making the eyes at me, I'll stop making the eyes at you, What it is that surprises me is that I don't really want you to, And your shoulders are frozen, Oh, but you're an explosion but you're dynamite’

or

‘And I'm struggling, I can't see through your fake tan, Yeah, you know it for a fact, That everybody's eating out of your hands’

It’s not the poetic, obscure wordplay of their later albums. But it grabs you by the throat and makes you listen. No second guessing of song meanings needed here. As Alex Turner sings the words‘So who's that girl there?, I wonder what went wrong, So that she had to roam the streets, She don’t do major credit cards, I doubt she does receipts‘ at the start of ‘When The Sun Goes Down’ you know exactly what’s going on.

However much the above lyrics may make the album sound like a lad rock style portrait of nights out (i.e. a Pigeon Detectives album) there’s more to it than that. ‘Mardy Bum’ shows flashes of the future, softer edged Alex Turner reminiscing about ‘cuddles in the kitchen, to get things off the ground’ before the power chords kick in.

Yet the main strengths of the album are in its mix of no nonsense social commentary and sharper hooks than you’d find in Peter Pan. ‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’, ‘A Certain Romance’, ‘Perhaps Vampires is a bit Strong But…’ the list goes on, songs packed with caustic wordplay and riffs that at times would make The Strokes ‘Is This It’ sound like a second rate pile of junk you’d find in the clearance bin of Woolworths.

If I’m honest, I could write twice as much as I have and still have things to say about this album. I’ve barely touched on the album’s opening songs and there are paragraphs worth of lyrics I could put in italics and tell you they were brilliant. But I’m not going to. For one, you’d get bored as shit of me. But also, I don’t have the words to properly convey why you should own this album. I can say things about the riffs and hooks, lyrics and tunes, but ultimately you need to go away and listen to it.