Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I Am Not, the debut album from the
Arctic Monkeys, captures the band mashing up
the Strokes and
the Libertines at will, jamming too many angular riffs into too short of a space, tearing through the songs as quickly as possible. But where
the Strokes camouflaged their songwriting skills with a laconic, take-it-or-leave-it sexiness, and
the Libertines mythologized England with a junkie poeticism,
the Artic Monkeys have made an album for the Information Overload Age: nearly every track here is overloaded with riffs and words, and just when it's about to sort itself out, it stops short. This doesn't make them or their debut bad, just surprisingly predictable: they're competent, lacking enough imagination or restlessness to do anything other than the expected.
–
Mark Deming, Rovi