Built around an organ line pulled from Ennio Morricone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly score, it marked a sonic departure from the otherwise punkish Favourite Worst Nightmare. “505” is one of the most interesting tracks in Arctic Monkeys’ catalog. But now when it comes around in the set, it’s just fun.” - S.V.L. “I probably fell out with it for a moment, somewhere along the way. But by 2011, he’d come around on “Dancefloor”: “It’s more fun than ever to play it,” he said. I scraped the bottom of the barrel.” Spoken with the arrogance of an artist who knows they have even better things in store. music-press hype ahead of Whatever People Say built to a fever pitch. “It’s a bit shit,” he told one interviewer as the U.K. (How many other songwriters would think of rhyming “Montagues and Capulets” with “banging tunes and DJ sets”?) It was an instant classic - and Turner began talking it down immediately. All the elements of their legend were in place already, from the irresistible forward rush of the music to the audacious puns in Turner’s lyrics. Arctic Monkeys blasted out of the gate in the fall of 2005 with their debut single: A fusillade of smart-assed teenage wit and overdriven riffs that set the stage for one of 21st-century rock’s few truly major success stories. Image Credit: Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images As Turner told NME, the song came from a goofy thought experiment after producer James Ford suggested the warning, “Don’t sit down ‘cause I’ve moved your chair” could be the title to “a ‘60s garage Nuggets tune.’” The band ran with it, concocting an array of imaginative scenarios that were equal parts ridiculous and dangerous - “Do the Macarena in the devil’s lair,” “Go into business with a grizzly bear,” “Bite the lightning and tell me how it tastes.” To paraphrase another towering music critic, Will Ferrell, “No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative - it gets the people going!” - J.B. Its psych-tinged guitars and doom-laden low end create an ominous air, but the lyrics fully embrace the absurd. To paraphrase the towering music critic Homer Simpson, a great chorus doesn’t have to “ mean anything - like, ‘Rama lama ding dong’ or ‘Give peace a chance.’” “Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair” is a fine entry in rock’s cannon of utter nonsense. Hopefully, though, this list expresses what’s so great about those lovable lads from Sheffield - the way they got us to stop asking, who the fuck are Arctic Monkeys?, and start wondering, who the fuck are Arctic Monkeys going to be next? Like any best of list, think of this as just a best of list, not the best of list (in other words, please don’t us). So here are 30 great Arctic Monkeys songs that celebrate and showcase that creativity and breadth. Even as his metaphors have grown more oblique, his imagery a touch phantasmagorical and deliciously ludicrous, his words remain grounded in the kind of kitchen sink realism that made Arctic Monkeys’ earliest recordings so thrilling and immediate. He’s a yarn weaver, as quick with a quip or a clever bit of wordplay as he is with some stark, sincere, sage distillation of the ways we live and love. And through his lyrics, Turner crafted a language and style all his own. In the 18 years since their debut single (“Fake Tales of San Francisco” b/w “From the Ritz to the Rubble,” still both among their best), they’ve crafted one of the most compelling catalogs in contemporary music, and Alex Turner has solidified his place as one of this generation’s great songwriters and frontmen.Īrctic Monkeys achieved this not through pandering or “playing the hits,” but by regularly confounding expectations: enlisting Josh Homme to gunk up their jitteriness with some desert sludge, or trading in their guitars for pianos as they embarked on a full-blown space odyssey. Arctic Monkeys not only avoided that fate, they thrived in the face of it. Any band that hits as hard as Arctic Monkeys hit in 2005 runs the risk of forever being trapped in rock ’n’ roll amber, doomed to push the same four-chord boulder up a hill, or fall into a nostalgic abyss.
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