Arctic Monkeys - I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor (Domino)
5/5
By: Matt Tomiak
We've all been there. But it doesn't feel like anyone's expressed such universal home truths with such brevity or wit in a long time.
A frantic, grottier 2005 upgrading of Franz Ferdinand's 'Take Me Out' 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor' features a chorus alone containing both a spot-on skewering of both the wilfully fickle romantic mindset ('I don't know if you're looking for romance/I don't know what your looking for') and an uproariously accurate, succinct appraisal of what constitutes indie fashion these days ('Dancing to electro-pop like a robot from 1984').
'Bigger Boys & Stolen Sweethearts' is finer still: The Smiths' 'I Know It's Over' re-written for 21st century northern council estate dwellers, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure. But there's something transcends the provincial in Alex Turner's pained description of an erstwhile lady friend who succumbs to the local meathead, a chap who 'pinched me bird, and he'd probably kick me head in.' Its gets better. 'You don't know what she's up to, you can only assume/If she's not out the front of the shops, then they've gone to his room.' It's like The Killer's 'Mr Brightside', with glitzy Vegas clubs substituted for shabby Sheffield boozers, and all the more enjoyable for it.
And then the wonderful pay-off: 'You thought she was nice - But she's not nice, in fact she's pretty f***ing far from nice.' No doubt the broadsheet supplements will soon be declaring Turner the 'modern day equivalent of Wordsworth' a la David Brent - but when a band capture the essence of contemporary British youth as well as the Arctic Monkeys do here, it's hard to avoid the hyperbole.
Artists in this article: Arctic Monkeys
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