For Your Pleasure

This month's sorting through the detritus of culture, high and low.

Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

Marcello Carlin almost had me sold on this latest NME-approved quartet of laddish ephemerality, not the least because he stresses this point: "And, like the Police, the Arctic Monkeys are the kind of group which only really makes sense when they are number one in the charts" [in England, of course]. I can understand why these guys are sensations: they enact every fantasy dreamt of by the mob. They may have titled one number "From the Ritz to the Rubble," but most of this album chronicles the reverse: a social climber with neither the cheekbones and pedigree of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers' Dostoyevsky-addled killer in Match Point, nor the murderous impulses of Luke Haines (Auteurs model, not Black Box Recorder), he's bilious and resourceful, but not enough to get him past the bouncers or persuade some bird to dance with him, so instead he gets pissed with his mates and narrowly avoids arrest by truncheon-wielding cops. Flashes of wisdom register not on Alex Turner, an asshole infatuated with the put-downs and allusions gleaned from a respectable middle-class education, all of which he's willing to eschew, of course, when he's serenading a whore with a heart of gold who's a lot like Roxanne. So far Turner's smart enough to realize he's gotta try harder ("But now this haze has ascended/It don't make sense no more," he confesses in "From the Ritz to the Rubble"); that his bandmates should stop embellishing their very good tunes with the usual post-punk aural decoupage (Andy Gill guitar, martial beats, elephantine structures, fill in the rest); that he's gotta lead the mob instead of half-assedly asserting his right to exploit its rage. GRADE: B+


* Sasha Frere-Jones, "A Ghost's World"

A brief, excellent overview of Ghostface Killah's remarkable career and review of his latest, Fishscale (four tracks produced by MF Doom!). Always trust great writers to remind you of an obvious-and-of-course-overlooked point: Ghostface's voice "is a gorgeous instrument, mellifluous even when he’s yelling, which he does an awful lot."


* The English Beat, "Can't Get Used to Losing You" and "Save it For Later"

When loneliness holds and horrifies, find succor in smut.