Arctic Monkeys – Favourite Worst Nightmare

I love the Arctic's lyrics and the music is performed very well. It's far from their best album, and I find it just average, it's not bad, just nothing stands out.

Love them or loathe them for it, the biggest selling point with the Arctic Monkeys has always been their ability to paint sardonic portraits with the smut and scum that lines the gutters of their native Sheffield. With success however, comes the irony that in order to sell big they inevitably get elevated above those fusty hangouts. The Strokes fucked it up, but with their similarly rush-released second offering, Arctic Monkeys appear to have it pegged.

Although the mardy bums, scummy men, riot vans and dreams of naughtiness which littered their debut have been replaced with a more contemplative take on teenage ennui, for the most part it's business as usual - the quartet serving up tales of youthful joy and trepidation whether their protagonists are sobering up outside a Barnsley kebab house at 4am or ingesting a fist of grade A toot courtesy of daddy's plastic.

Sound-wise, 'Favourite Worst Nightmare' is less pop and more punk; less melodious but more urgent. With their intense build-up and releases bolstered by a newfound dark and acerbic layer, the album sees the band moving on from the Libertines-aping chord structures of their debut and pushing in new directions, most noticeably on the surf-guitar balladry of 'Only Ones Who Know' and the rubbery funk of 'D Is For Dangerous'.

With the burden of holding the record for the fastest selling debut album of all time on their shoulders, you can occasionally sense the band's acknowledgment that they need to make a good follow up, but the strain of expectation isn't made too obvious, and it's often used to their advantage. Indeed, on 'Teddy Picker' the self-awareness is channelled into a dark yet jaunty desert rock charged with a sense of knowing danger. An attack on the absurdity of celebrity culture, the track aptly announces the band's position on refusing to whore themselves out, and is skilfully placed alongside 'Brianstorm', the chorus-free take on their time spent wondering what to say to a backstage interloper.

Despite being heralded by some as the heir to the wordy crown of Morrissey, Alex Turner's lyrical output, until now, has been largely overrated - charming and occasionally funny, but rarely poetic or daring. On 'Fluorescent Adolescent', however, the singer's detached lyrical way works wonders when describing the sexual proclivities of a dried-up thirty-something. "She likes her gentleman to be gentle/Was it a Mecca dobber or a betting pencil?" he asks, with the simple, sleazy northern innuendo sketched infinitely sharper than a million Kaiser Chiefs or Maximo Parks.

On 'This House Is A Circus' the frontman coats small town frustrations with a Hollywood sheen singing "We're forever unfulfilled/And can't think why/Like a search for murder clues/In a dead man's eyes" - the celluloid cadence continuing on 'If You Were There, Beware', with its spectral piano line and cadaverous delivery.

With his generous - and occasionally grating - use of the words ‘sunshine' and ‘darling' Turner is a dab hand at being condescending, but on lounge-paced album closer '505' we discover he doesn't have all the answers. Instead, the track sees him open and insecure, with endless months on the road revealing a previously unseen honesty in the singer. With young lust replaced by yearning romance, it's a genuinely touching climax to an album that sees Arctic Monkeys - in the absence of any truly great pop band - remaining Britain's sharpest sonic prospect.