Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'M Not

Product Information

On Monday, the Arctic Monkeys sold 118,501 copies of their debut album in the UK, more than the rest of the top 20 combined. Yet from the urgent drum rolls and pulsing guitars of opening song “The View From The Afternoon,” it’s clear this ‘band DNA’ has meshed into something uniquely exciting. In the edit page, go to the 'Metadata' tab and add your Juno artist, label or release page for listeners to purchase your release / releases. The album was the best selling British record of 2006, yet, the achievement of Arctic Monkeys is bigger than just articulating shared experience in a catchy manner – after all, they had already achieved that with their online demos as those early festival audiences showed.

On sharp, observational, and detail-heavy Saturday Night and Sunday Morning tracks like the “Red Lights Indicate Doors Are Secure,” “Mardy Bum,” and “Riot Van” the band justifies taking their album name from the kitchen-sink drama. And it’s true it is a love song, a touching vignette of domestic diplomatic relations (mainly the boyfriend narrator trying to dig himself out of a hole) but it’s a charming, perfectly shot scene from the heart so it works.Beyond that, we picked this album because it feels like, in some ways, the Arctic Monkeys just broke through in the U.

But wringing lyrics from the everyday or articulating the dissatisfaction of many is risky and difficult business and, unlike those listed above, the Monkeys aren’t so much spinning deft tales of quotidian anxiety as just complaining about their first steps into nightlife, run-ins with bouncers, cops, and schoolmates. and this one couldn’t be clearer: if you’re a fan of rock music in the 2000s, it is absolutely an essential album. Much of the credit for that quick rise is rightly given to the power of the internet: The then-unsigned band first caught the public ear when its demos circulated last year. What’s meant to be different about them are sometimes keenly expressive lyrics and that irresistible backstory.I always look at it and think someone’s got a Saturday job there, they’re 17, they’re stuck in Doncaster and they fucking hate it—that’s the person we're publishing for. And it was this massive moment that is hard to draw an analog to in American rock music without going back like 20-25 years. The Strokes and Kings of Leon were a big deal, but the mammoth rock n’ roll band was kind of gone from the landscape by then. They’re in some ways the first band that was a generation inspired by the Strokes and that New York rock n’ roll revival.

The defiant, fuzz-filled voodoo maraca of “Perhaps Vampire Is A Bit Strong…” is a crack at hometown doubters. Then I asked Alex if he’d had inkling that he was on to a good thing when they first started writing songs for their debut.

It would be nice to think that a democratized music industry would mean the kids are tossing up alternatives to what they're already getting, but the Arctic Monkeys are, at their heart, the same sort of meat’n’potatoes guitar rock that has dominated the UK since the emergence of the Strokes, if not Oasis.

The art print is packaged inside the album on the back cover, and the obi strip will actually have the cocktail print on its inside. Hundreds more – fans and media alike – were stuck trying to sneak a glimpse while listening to the band from outside the circus tent, all because of a host of demos posted on a message-board by a friend of the group who styled himself as “Sheriff Of Sheffield”-- and one self-released EP--had made the group the hottest prospect in years. Andrew Winistorfer: The interesting thing with the Arctic Monkeys in that lineage is that--and I don’t know if people really draw this line--is that they’re one of the first bands that was like, “We listened to Is This It and wanted to be in a band. Thus while “Dancing Shoes,” the record’s fourth track, kicks off a triptych of tracks that further expands Turner’s snapshot of nightclubs, sweaty bodies and adolescent butterflies, each song takes us somewhere fresh. Thanks to those demos posted online – which were re-shared on MySpace initially linking the band’s rise to the social network despite them not actually having an account – everyone in that festival tent knew every word to every – still officially unreleased – song.It’s a well of nocturnal naughtiness this album draws from repeatedly, yet the band emerges with something fresh, as the chart-topping “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” confirms.