In my "book", 2006 wasn't exactly a stellar year for music. Apart from this album, only Jay Reatard's *Blood Vision*, TV On The Radio's *Return To The Cookie Mountain*, Joanna Newsom's *Ys* and probably Amy Winehouse's *Back To Black* can reach the "essential" level usually reached by at least a dozen of LPs for most other years. To be perfectly honest, I thought this rave about Arctic Monkeys was a bit of an exaggeration at the time, but now I readily admit that revisiting this past hype is pretty thrilling, all things considered. Alex Turner has always been a *chatty* frontperson, to a fault sometimes (especially recently), but in this official debut the instrumentation is so insanely lively, youthful and inspired that it makes up for it tenfold (if only for that crazy powerhouse of a drummer, whose cheeky mug is shown on the cover up here if I'm not mistaken). And Turner's lyrics are really, really evocative or witty most of the time anyway. I could go track by track here (which means I would have to write all those incredibly long song titles -- another evidence of Turner's knack with words), but it would probably not really be useful: you got to listen to the whole shebang. To put it in a nutshell, I say *yes*, this record looks as essential in a list of 1000 best albums of all time as it looks good on the dancefloor. So when it comes to that realm of noughts British dance punk LPs, (here infused with quite a bit of garage and indie-rock), you surely need to give a spin to this LP -- along with Block Party's *Silent Alarm* and Franz Ferdinand's début. You could maybe also add Arctic Monkeys' own *Favorite Worst Nightmare* and *AM*, and you would have a long enough sublist to cover your ground here. Giving this one full marks, even if it's closer to a 4.5 grade in reality. I gave full marks to the (strikingly different) Joanna Newsom and TV On The Radio albums from that year, so I gotta maintain a minimum consistency, I guess... Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book. Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 464 (including this one) Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 277 Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334