Album: Arctic Monkeys

When success comes as suddenly, and hugely, as it did for the Arctic Monkeys last year, it's impossible for a band not to be changed by its vertiginous rise. Overnight, they become public property, pestered in the supermarket, and an unbidden distance somehow inserts itself into old friendships.

Then there are all the new "friends" who materialise, eager to press their claims on the stars' attention - people like the subject of "Brianstorm" (sic), which gets this follow-up album off at a gallop, with a pell-mell riff and a few sharp observations about some pushy entrepreneur with bad dress-sense and rapacious attitude. "I doubt it's your style not to get what you set out to acquire," notes Alex Turner acidly, but it's clear that, in their case at least, Brian has struck out in the most satisfying way possible, inspiring a probable hit.

Similar vampires stalk other songs, like the "circle of witches, ambitiously vicious" pestering Turner in "If You Were There, Beware", and the drunk girl of "The Bad Thing", for whom a casual affair takes on problematic ramifications in the glare of his celebrity. And is it just his fame-fuelled paranoia, or is the hometown nightlife so sharply detailed on Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not actually getting lairier, as appears to be the case in songs like "Balaclava", "D Is For Dangerous" and "This House is a Circus"? Are people acting up around him, trying to live up to the reckless lifestyle he depicted? As he reflects in "Teddy Picker", "who'd want to be men of the people, when there's people like you?".

Small wonder that Turner should relish the mind-broadening experience of travel - though even that is regarded with a certain ambivalence in "505" and "Old Yellow Bricks", as he compares the comforts and security of home with the fascinations of the unknown. But after months spent flitting from city to city, country to country, even the once enticing parade of sexual, social and geographical novelty develops a dull, flat monotony. "Dorothy was right, though," Turner realises at the end of "Old Yellow Bricks".

Of course, the band's music has been altered, too. They're stretching tentacles into other musical areas, not least the disco-funk-rock groove of "Old Yellow Bricks", the organ-fattened, stop-start "Fluorescent Adolescent", and particularly the ruminative approach of the sole slow number "Only Ones Who Know", couched in cavernous reverb and embellished with Richard Hawley-esque retro-twang guitar. If the Monkeys continue to develop like this, and manage to avoid the distractions and evade the hangers-on, who knows what they might achieve?

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Brianstorm', 'Fluorescent Adolescent', 'Only Ones Who Know'

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