arctic monkeys - "a certain romance" (from the whatever people say i am, that's what i'm not lp, available for preorder here.)

yes, we're nearing the point of monkeys overload, but unlike that other track i posted, this one is actually really fucking good. if i were to tell you, "hey, this is the longest track on the album," you'd probably say, "that means it sucks that many more times than any of their other tracks, the degree of suckiness depending on a certain ratio between the lengths of the two songs."

but i think it's like this : "a certain romance" is the last song on the record. so, what they're really saying is, "listen, we know that everything before this one is shit, but, you know, we're really trying here. we wanted to keep your expectations low and wow you w/ the last track, to give you the sense that, b/c it's the last track, it's also the most recent track we wrote, which means that this, and not the rest of it, is the Shape of Things to Come."

i do hope so, b/c this is a band to get excited about. sure, the lead singer still sounds like the guy from maroon 5 but english, but he gets off some great lines about how, in this part of town, there's only music so people can have new ring tones. and you know what he says? he says, "there ain't no romance around [here.]" i like everything about that line, right down to the phrasing. the band, for their part, try to conjure a little romance, throwing off misty-eyed guitar parts left and right, recalling better days in english guitar pop, before building to a thundering climax that really lets you know how they feel about their surroundings.

perhaps i've been too harsh on the monkeys; perhaps they do have a certain something after all.