Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 2.5/5 Released: February 14, 2006 Reviewer: Nathan Atnikov |
It’s nothing new for the British media, and NME in particular, to aggressively hype new bands in an effort to find the next big thing, and no band in recent history has been treated to such a forceful campaign as the Arctic Monkeys. For months building up to the release of their debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, North America prepared to hear the next great British rock band. What we got instead was a British rock band that sounds like a British rock band, and not much else.
The album starts off promisingly enough with the frenetic ‘The View from the Afternoon,’ and the hit ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,’ but from then on is little more than a series of Brit-Rock clichés. Borrowing from both the garage-rock of the Libertines and the new-wave of Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys don’t bring anything to the table but some dance grooves and the odd funky riff. Even the allegedly clever song titles seem tired.
If anything, the frenzied energy of the openers is the problem; that kind of aggression simply cannot be sustained over the course of 13 songs. If whittled down to an EP, Whatever You Say might just have been the classic we expected.
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