Pitchfork

For all the laurels heaped upon Arctic Monkeys' Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, the album's stodgy aesthetic belies the UK band's impressive lyrical and melodic achievements. "Do Me a Favour" is the song from follow-up Favourite Worst Nightmare that best illustrates how the Sheffield foursome have grown, especially sonically, since that 2006 debut. The track begins modestly, with busy drum work recalling old Stone Roses as much as contemporaries Klaxons (with whom the Arctics share producer James Ford, of Simian Mobile Disco). A mechanical indie-dance guitar riff intersects with wide-open spaghetti-western strums.

Alex Turner's assured vocals carry a whiff of Damon Albarn's late-90s melancholy, as the young singer and songwriter deftly lays out the scene of a tearful breakup: a damp steering wheel at morning, hours that feel like weeks, forced smiles. "Do me a favour/ And break my nose," the just-ditched dude eventually asks, though it's unclear whether he's begging or sneering. Turner now shifts his sympathies from the dumped to the dumper, who also has a small "favor" in mind. It's here the guitars come alive, soaring into the kind of blistering catharsis we yanks might seek from the Arcade Fire, and a closing line so nice the ex-gf says it twice: "Perhaps 'fuck off' would be too kind/ Perhaps 'fuck off' would be too kind." Ouch.