Art Brut: Art Brut vs. Satan
Art Brut: Art Brut vs. Satan
Also In The News
|
As you may have heard, everyone's favourite NYC trio since Run DMC have ditched the licks and lapped up the electro for their third long player. |  |
Thursday, 16, Apr 2009 01:00
Cooking Vinyl, April 20th.
In a nutshell...
Knowing, rye, scathing, sharp and would-be witty.
What's it all about?
Following the merely moderate success of It's A Bit Complicated, Art Brut return for another bite at the indie-pop cherry. Not much has changed; Eddie Argos directs his acerbic rants at the lowest common denominator, guitars scratch and scrabble while the lock-step rhythm section keeps everything on the road.
Familiar targets are in the crosshairs; supermarket musos, insincere megastars, dilettante rock-bands and, of course, former lovers. The headline here is the production role for Frank Black, but even this has had a negligible impact on the group's sparse, frenetic sound.
Who's it by?
With hype inflating their role in the so-called Art Wave scene to almost biblical proportions overnight, Art Brut exploded into the collective conciseness with a fistful or sharp one-liners and an irreverent attitude in tune with a very specific demographic. Those who listened to the Velvet Underground, drank snakebite in sticky floored indie clubs and wore the same t-shirt for a week instantly discovered a poet-laureate for their times, while others just walked away from what they perceived as a novelty band.
Instead of calling in an orchestra and releasing a concept album when the joke began to wear a little thin on the group's second album, (with Art Brut in danger of becoming a parody of themselves), the group simply kept things the same and tried again with this third effort.
As an example...
"There are so many people I might have upset, so I apologise to them all with the same group text." – Alcoholic Unanimous.
"Slap dash for no cash, those are the records I like, when something doesn't sound quite right." – Slap Dash for No Cash.
Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys
Nil. Art Brut – by definition – are an outsiders band.
The group's rhetoric is designed to appeal to those on the fringes of mainstream musical society – those who turn their noses up at Coldplay but argue Elbow are pioneering. Art Brut welcome converts with open arms and may be rewarded with an increase in sales here, but the chances of a chart position are virtually nil.
What the others say
"The main problem with art wave is that its irony has a tendency of becoming easily inverted, with bands ultimately sounding like a Chris Morris piss-take of themselves. Worse still, because the irony trick is played with such incessant predictability, the whole album merges into one slightly unfunny joke." - Gideon Brody, The Music Magazine
"I put this album on expecting not to like it, but with Pixies frontman Frank Black taking role as the producer, combined with Eddie Argos' witty lyrics about unashamedly reading comics and stalking girls, it becomes an undeniable guilty pleasure." - Emma Garland, the405.com
So is it any good?
No. That joke just isn't funny anymore.
Here Eddie Argos is mining the same veins of humour as the last two albums with noticeably diminishing returns. There are still the paint by numbers discussions of former girlfriends and evenings out (Alcoholic Unanimous, What a Rush), but they have lost their original dazzling impact; Art Brut need to evolve of this will be their final effort; if even hired guns Graham Coxon and Frank Black can't spice things up a little there seems to be little chance of a late career renaissance here.
What's more, instead of peddling razor sharp insight addressed to the everyman at the bar, Argos also turns his attention to his inner life. This is a disaster. While milkshakes and comic books (DC Comics and Chocolate Milkshakes) may have provided idle fodder for Eddie Argos in his youth, there can be little appetite among listeners to have these topics examined here. Art Brut have always appealed to a knowing few, but by cutting their audience down further here the group are alienating the few who originally championed the act.
6/10
Chris O'Toole