WPSIA, TWIN is funk, twitch, speed, and most importantly dance rock – a concept much easier for an alpha male to cop to when he’s backed by the kind of Gang of Four guitar shred featured here (and Turner’s vocals aren’t nearly as mechanical as Go4’s Jon King). With guitar strings soaked in a blistering agent, guitarist Jamie Cook whips through chord progressions while Turner speed-walks to line ends so he can display a Johnny Rotten sneer that he wisely caps. You get the occasional breather with the likes of “Mardy Bum,” which flows like a radio song, but Arctic Monkeys are apt to bookend with arena rock guitar pieces so they can fill the gaps by taking the path of a housefly. See the schizo U.K. Number One “I Bet You Look Good On the Dance Floor,” which in keeping with the fun drops references to both Duran Duran (“Your name isn’t Rio/but I don’t care for sand”) and Shakespeare (“Oh there ain’t no love, no Montagues or Capulets/Just banging tunes in DJ sets”).

If the subject matter quickly stales, Turner does his best to keep it fresh with an epistemic hunger for metrical experimentation and explanations that are subtly poetic. It’s impossible to tell whether he is racing or paced by the guitar movements of “View from the Afternoon,” which fall dead silent before ramping up to drop a little insight into his creative process: “You can pour your heart out around three o’clock/When the two-for-one’s undone the writers block.” In rough Brit fashion, Arctic Monkeys have no use for the constraints of such institutions as song structure (or album/song title length, for that matter). “Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong But…” opens with safe alt-rock guitar sludge alongside nimble picking to pull in both the head-bobbers and the dancers, and closes with scatological divides and the kind of vocal-only pit-scream you’d expect from the Fall. This track also proves these boys to be wise beyond their years – like a rapper hitting the scene already bragging about his girls and gold, these lads are one-album deep and already scene-weary: “All you people are vampires/All your stories are stale/Though you pretend to stand by us/Though you’re certain we’ll fail.”

It’s a crapshoot as to whether an album like this catches on Stateside, but working in their favor is the fact that Arctic Monkeys have more bounce than the Libertines (didn’t take), forge a safer path to oblivion than the Streets (didn’t take), and unleash dancey, Gang of Four rhythms as competently as Franz Ferdinand (certainly took).

I’m not ready to hail it as a “modern classic,” as the New York Times recently did (it took me a year to fully ingest the merits of Revolver – an album that fell four slots behind Arctic Monkeys on NME’s list), but hey, hey, they’re the Arctic Monkeys and they’re too busy dancin’ to worry about any kind of heavy impact. Once the weight of their celebrity is absorbed, we can inspect future releases with a more bookish eye. WPSIA, TWIN will suffice as an eruption of wasted youth that is as competent a burnout anthem as Green Day’s Dookie, and maintains a Holden Caulfield edge in independent, rangy spirit and snot-nosed cockiness. Good enough for now.

Sound
This is not a raw, punk debut that will have fans of future releases clamoring for that pre-sellout Arctic Monkeys sound. For a non-major label debut that built steam through Internet chatter, this is as clean as productions get.

The timing and sound match nicely, the proper piece is brought to the forefront when necessary (bass on “Perhaps Vampires,” drums on “A Certain Romance”). Nothing gets lost, clutters or overextends, and even Turner’s thick English accent is discernible enough to the untrained Yankee ear.