Why is Arctic Monkeys’ Who the F*** Are Arctic Monkeys? on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
This is a (small!) collection of songs that demanded to make this list by a fun, brash, and talented band at their early best.
Some stats & info about Arctic Monkeys – Who the F*** Are Arctic Monkeys?
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock, Alternative Rock, British Bands, Pop, Hard Rock
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 3.5 out of 5 stars
- When was Who the F*** Are Arctic Monkeys? released? 2006
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #937 out of 1,000
Arctic Monkeys’ Who the F*** Are Arctic Monkeys? on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective take on what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.
What does Arctic Monkeys’ Who the F*** Are Arctic Monkeys? mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
This is a pretty terrific album showing off the fun, brash, and talented Arctic Monkeys at their early best. But it’s also a short album, an “EP,” in fact. It comprises five songs in total. Which gets into the weird and nerdy (and lovely!) challenge of putting together a list as audacious and ambitious as this one.
How does a short, polished, and sweet album (album-ette?) compare with a massive, bloated album with a handful of solid to great songs? Well, it depends and it’s as complicated and subjective as you’d expect.
But where things landed here is that this is a collection of songs that demanded to be included in my particular list of 1,000 best albums ever. So there you have it, #938 with a bullet as the old saying goes.
In any event, all five songs are strong and well worth listening to. For my money, though, the self-titled track, “Who the F*** Are Arctic Monkeys?” is the best of the batch. It has an angular, syncopated rhythm that’s sexy, rocking, and slinky at the same time, music that makes you want dress up posh and head down to your favorite dive bar, lounge, pub, or petting zoo.
Okay, maybe not one of those.
“No Buses” then wonderfully shows off a lighter touch for the band. Expertly produced, it builds off a strumming guitar rhythm into a highly hummable tune of yearning and longing of some sort.
An ache in your soul
Is everybody’s goal
To get what they can’t have
That’s why you’re after her
This album also sounds like
Let’s put this between the Libertines and the Kaiser Chiefs, who’s gonna argue? Oh, you? Well fine.
Pop culture stuff that’s somehow related to Arctic Monkeys’ Who the F*** Are Arctic Monkeys?
An “EP” stands for Extended Play, which sort of makes sense when it’s framed as “a musical recording that contains more tracks than a single but fewer than an album or LP record.” What’s LP mean, you ask? That’d be “long playing” or “long play.” If you dig back into the history of the music recording industry, it’s kind of fascinating to look back on an era where “45s” (or vinyl singles) were a thing, and it was only over time that the album format became dominant in terms of music sales and musical creation.
Does that dominance still hold today, you ask? Let’s table that discussion for another time, my friends.