Arctic Monkeys

Even though their “old” album, 2006’s “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” has yet to become old, the young Arctic Monkeys have, with “Favourite Worst Nightmare,” done it again. They’ve released another phenomenally listenable album of pounding guitars and even harder (read: more scathing) lyrics. Once again, lead singer and guitarist Alex Turner and the other Monkeys from Sheffield, England, give us a delicious taste of blue-collar anger. This time around, the guitars might be a little louder and the sound a bit fuller, but the disc stays true to the promise and spirit of the group’s debut.

The album is structured like a thunderstorm whose beauty is at first lost amidst the chaos of pouring rain, booming thunder, and terrifying lightning. It begins with “Brianstorm,” a piece full of blasting guitars that make it difficult to listen to any of the song’s other instruments. But, though the riffage continues to dominate in the subsequent tracks “Teddy Picker” and “D is for Dangerous,” the nuances become apparent and the melody amidst the ruckus appears.

Suddenly, there’s a lull in the storm. “Balaclava” (a hidden gem sandwiched between the in-your-face openers and the sweet melodies that follow) transitions into a set of softer tunes that could be mistaken for ballads if you weren’t listening to the lyrics.

Just as furiously sarcastic as the earlier tracks, these middle songs are all the more powerful for their understated arrangements. “Fluorescent” opens with a call-and-response between two guitars, reminiscent of wide-eyed ’60s pop, but the Arctic Monkeys are anything but innocent. Their three-minute tirade against a trashy girl who hides her flaws behind a façade of respectability is brilliantly hateful, with a smooth melody and tight lyrics (“You used to get it in your fishnets / Now you only get it in your nightdress”).

The hardness of the opening songs is echoed in the later songs, but the storm never rages as intensely again. The sound becomes a little rougher in “Do Me a Favor” and “This House is a Circus,” which both crescendo and end with wailing guitars. The latter of those two songs is a lyrical masterpiece about the quixotic search for complete satisfaction in life: “And we’re forever unfulfilled / Can’t think why / Like a search for murder clues / In dead man’s eyes.”

The rain eventually subsides. “If You Were There, Beware,” “The Bad Thing,” and “Old Yellow Bricks” all have their moments of blasting guitars, but while they’re tuneful, they’re not particularly distinctive. They all seem to be lifted from the earlier album—good but already heard before (the guitar of “Old Yellow Bricks” sounds identical to that of “Dancing Shoes” in certain instances).

“505,” a song about trying to return to a past embodied by a highway, highlights the band’s mellower side. Its last words are delicate, and Turner understands that the words have to be handled carefully. Sung too sentimentally, too sadly, and they become trite; sung too angrily or sarcastically and they become meaningless.

But the Arctic Monkeys get it just right with this song, as they do on the whole album. As their last few lines attest, “In my imagination you’re waiting lying on your side / With your hands between your thighs / And a smile.” It’s a post-storm rainbow and a hopeful indication of what the Monkeys will be like when they’re even older.