I suspect few records released in 2007 are going to provoke as much argument as this second Arcade Fire album, "Neon Bible". A week before the official release date, you can already feel it coming, as inexorable as the tidal waves and imprecations of doom that fill Win Butler's lyrics. Many people who loved "Funeral" seem to be finding "Neon Bible" a bit of a disappointment. In the new issue of Uncut, out this week, Allan Jones makes a persuasive case for "Neon Bible" being a flawed, intermittently brilliant follow-up, where the personal tragedies that informed "Funeral" have been replaced with a nebulous, and less engaging, sense of global meltdown. You get the impression, too, that a bunch of old fans are snooty about how the Arcade Fire are suddenly enormous, a frighteningly popular stadium rock band where once there was an approachable indie group – albeit one with unashamedly big ideas. For what it's worth, I thought "Funeral" was fractionally overrated. Hugely impressive, but the relentless intensity of it all was just too over-wrought for me to play often. Live, of course, that same intensity worked in the band's favour. "Neon Bible" is undeniably clunky in places; surely, the trope of using Christian revivalist imagery as a means to get a secular message across is a bit played out now? But in general, "Neon Bible" feels more musically nuanced, and better paced. The grandiose melodramatic moments are now given more context, and there's more range to these songs. We know the Arcade Fire can do the heroic euphoria-in-the-face-of-the-four-horsemen-of-the-apocalypse tunes, and the revamped version of "No Cars Go" and "Intervention" are as good as they come. Today, though, I'm taken with the stealthier corners of "Neon Bible": the "Killing Moon" swirl of "Black Mirror"; Regine Chassagne's arty, awkward half of "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations"; and, especially, "Ocean Of Noise", which reminds me of subdued and neglected parts of the Pixies catalogue – like "Ana", maybe – before it reaches a stirring Mariachi finale. It's stuff like this that’ll keep me coming back to this fine record. . . Which you can hear right now, incidentally, streaming over at NME. Let me know what you think.

Thanks for all your comments on the Arctic Monkeys blog. Hopefully, I should have my own copy of the album in a few weeks, and I'll post something more considered than last week's effort once I've listened to it more than once. In the meantime, I figured I should allay one or two fears. Someone called John left a comment saying, "Klaxons album is full of ugly acid noises, I hope this one is not." It isn't, John, don't worry. There are some discreet keyboard atmospherics here and there, but the comparison with The Klaxons was more to do with the bright, angular energy which I think James Ford has highlighted in his production of both bands. I see something scribbled in my notes vaguely comparing "Brianstorm" to "Atlantis To Interzone", but it's a small detail. Anyway, Uncut is sent around 800 CDs a month, and it's my job to preview the best ones every day here at Wild Mercury Sound. Any thoughts, recommendations and questions are welcome. All being well, I'll post something about the new Arcade Fire album later day. See you later.

So we’re sitting in Domino’s new offices, somewhere on an industrial estate in Wandsworth. There’s a train track outside one window, a gas holder outside the other, and some old Pavement and Sebadoh posters on the floor. Then there’s this massive crash of very heavy drums and guitars. The new Arctic Monkeys album has started, it seems. This is "Brianstorm", the first track and the first single from "Favourite Worst Nightmare". My first thought is that Alex Turner hasn’t got any better at writing song titles. My second is that this is really, really good. I only hear the album once, and I’ve been over-excited at playbacks before – so apologies if the album turns out to be a stinker. I don’t think it will, though. "Favourite Worst Nightmare" is a whole lot bigger-sounding than "Whatever People Say. . .", but not in a lame stadium-wannabe way. It doesn’t feel bloated like so many follow-up albums by successful indie bands - the ropey new Kaiser Chiefs album being a case in point. Instead, it really is more ambitious, heavier – Jamie Cook’s guitar-playing resembles that of Josh Homme more than Carl Barat in many places – and with a fiercely bright production from James Ford, who did such a good job on The Klaxons’ debut. There are certain similarities with that Klaxons record, in fact. It’s not a new rave album, by any stretch, but it feels more part of an art-rock lineage than in the blokerock tradition of Oasis et al. The funk influence is more pronounced, particularly in the bass playing of Nick O’Malley (much better than Andy Nicholson, on this evidence). Tracks like "D Is For Dangerous", especially, are vaguely reminiscent of The Rapture finding a new terrace populism. The opening few tracks are frantic, awkward and pretty uncompromising, and my potentially untrustworthy notes also describe them as a hybrid of Queens Of The Stone Age and The Specials. Then Track Five, "Fluorescent Adolescent", ambles out, by some distance the catchiest song the Monkeys have ever recorded. From hereon in, the most notable influence is The Smiths, I think. Maybe the dreamy, elegiac Smiths of "Strangeways Here We Come": there are some twanging, quasi-ambient backdrops to a couple of songs, and Turner’s voice has matured beautifully, crooning like Morrissey or Richard Hawley. Another track (Turner has explicitly asked we don’t write too much about specifically-named songs, and I’m happy to comply at this stage) reminds me a bit of "Girl Afraid", though Turner is virtually rapping on it. If you still want Turner to be a northern romantic, writing about Sheffield teenage life with a documentary precision, you may be disappointed. There’s little of that, and I suspect he thinks he’d be faking it to place himself back in that world. A lot of these songs seem to be about women, about temptation, about being desired – in a self-satirising rather than arrogant way, though. "Do the bad thing/ Take off your wedding ring," goes one chorus. Turner’s melodies still have that wandering, made-up-as-he-goes-along charm. The heart of the Arctic Monkeys remains the same, it’s just the packaging that has got bigger and stranger. "Favourite Worst Nightmare" feels, too, like a band asserting themselves. If Alex Turner was highlighted as some kind of street poet last year, it’s harder to separate him out from his bandmates: Cook, in particular, is rampant here. I’m trying not to get carried away, but today I like it even more than "Whatever People Say. . ." Now, if only I could hear it again. . .