Arctic Monkeys @ Blank Canvas
By Holden DeForge
There's an air of anticipation at the Blank Canvas, tickets have been trading for silly money and there are people here who wouldn't usually venture out to see a band on a Monday evening. There's a buzz and an incredible hype around Arctic Monkeys that has gotten people excited.
They have excited Milburn so much that they have pretty much set up an Arctic Monkeys tribute act. Perhaps that does them a disservice but on tonight's evidence it seems that Milburn manage to churn out the same disjointed pop stylings yet without the lyrical wit or magical, musical spark to really ignite the earbuds. The crowd digest them because they have to, much like being dragged along to your partner's friends for a candlelight supper; "yes, this homemade lasagne is wonderful" you might exclaim, when really you just want to get to the Marks & Spencers cheesecake of whose quality you are already aware. There's just nothing that stays in the memory to remind you that Milburn are a good band... so perhaps we can assume they are not.
We all nag our friends to listen to this band and that band, we love them and we want to share it. However, our friends are apathetic and unless they have something rammed down their throat by the mass media they assume it is tripe. And so Oasis, Coldplay, Radiohead, James Blunt, Kaiser Chiefs, David Gray, Damien Rice all make it into our friends' CD collections, some with our approval, some to our dismay. Arctic Monkeys seem like another band destined to enter the casual music buyer's vocabulary. It's evident from the amateur crowd surfing, the football chants and the general demeanour of the crowd that this is not an audience you would find down the New Roscoe checking out the local acoustic scene. It's a mixed crowd of those hanging onto the hype and those with the musical nous to scrape away the bullshit and see that Arctic Monkeys do in fact have two legs of their very own to stand upon. The legs are strong and robust and should carry them far on their musical journey. By no means revolutionary or musically bewildering, what the Sheffield Boys do have is an ear for a melody and the lyrics to make them as good as the Doherty worshippers of the world believed The Libertines to be. Effective musicians and a frontman who manages to remain charming, friendly and yet defiant in his dispute with the bottle-throwing dickheads in the crowd, Arctic Monkeys have the makings of being great, whilst perhaps not quite elevating to the greatness which people already hold them beyond.
Their music makes people move, as evident from the off with the latest single 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor', and their lyrics charm and raise a smile, most notably on 'Fake Tales Of San Francisco'. It's a strong live set that qualifies a lot of the hype and expectation around the band, yet somehow there is still the nagging doubt that without the hype machine a large percentage of us wouldn't even have cared so much to be here.
