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

Herald rating: ****

Sooner or later, they'll probably regret that name. It sounds as if it was coined by a bunch of lads at a time when "long-term future" meant until the end of the school year or reaching the legal drinking age - not until the novelty of being the most feted band in Britain wore off.

All the same, it does allude to some brass-ballsiness, a quality which makes this debut a believe-the-hype kind of album.

It is excruciatingly English, care of frontman Alex Turner and his articulate voice about life on his local dead-end streets. But it's also universal in its sheer urgency.

It's punk strained through funk, the Mod-rock sensibilities of the Jam, the pop bite of the Buzzcocks, and some ska-derived wiriness. It's an album which suggests they've managed to sustain the livewire energy of Blur's Song 2 across a whole album.

After its feverish start, The View From the Afternoon, it barely lets up through the headrush fuzzpop of I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, the time-signature-crunching Fake Tales of San Francisco, or the Rock-The-Casbah-ish Dancing Shoes.

Turner's best vignette is on the relatively sedate Riot Van with its tale of lads coming a cropper with some coppers. He further confirms himself as Britrock's answer to The Streets' Mike Skinner on Mardy Bum and the prostitute portrait When The Sun Goes Down.

Some of the later tracks among the 13 stop this short of being as wondrous a debut as it hints it might be at the start. But for the most part Whatever People Say I Am ... shows the Arctic Monkeys as a band who naff name is more than offset by a real sense of personality and one lyrical genius in the making.

Label: Domino/EMI