Favourite Worst Nightmare

6.5/10

Four snotty British kids forming a band and making a big splash in the U.S. isn't the most plausible of plots, but somehow the Arctic Monkeys managed to pull it off with 2006's Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not. The band managed to make snarky lyrical asides and dancy, wiry guitars cool again, fifteen minutes after Franz Ferdinand had pulled off the same feat.



The catch here is that Whatever People Say I Am... was a big breakout success and it came out of nowhere, so the band is facing expectations so high that they're almost sacreligious going into their second album, Favourite Worst Nightmare. Now the only question to really be answered here is "Does the record deliver?" the answer may be slightly surprising to some people and it is...yes and no.

The album starts off with the aptly titled "Brianstorm" which aside from being a rather deceptive title (try looking at it in iTunes for a half hour straight trying to figure out whether it's supposed to be spelled that way or not) is a really good track and hints at some development. No discernible chorus, different instrumental touches, this could be their turning point. The very next track "Teddy Picker" however brings back the same old new-rave sound of Whatever People Say I Am... this isn't necessarily a bad thing but it just seems the way it did listening to Room On Fire you're left wondering what direction this thing is really going to go, and Jesus Christ, it's only two songs in!

Ultimately, the album delivers on the same punchy delivery and even ups the ante in those terms, these boys had a new bassist to break in since the departure of Andy Nicholson, and Nick O'Malley does a fine job filling in, but this album has a rougher more punk approach and the instruments are thrashed to ribbons on most of the songs represented here except for a few. "Fluorescent Adolescent" is brilliantly wistful with lines like "discarded all your naughty nights for niceness/landed in a very common crisis" followed up with "nothing seems as pretty as the past though". "The Only Ones Who Know" calls lovers on foreign soil to mind and sounds sweet but tastes bitter with the addition of the lyrics. "Do Me A Favour" is driving and interesting with one of the best lines in memory "How to tear apart the ties that bind/perhaps fuck off might be too kind". Of course for all of this good there is the bad, "Old Yellow Bricks" feels like nothing more than the usual dance floor filler and features the strangest guitar line in history, in the last seventeen seconds of the song, I defy any listener to not think of Knight Rider.

Overall Favourite Worst Nightmare is an adequate follow-up even if its approach is somewhat inconsistent in comparison with the carpet bomb that was Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not