Of all the things that make Art Brut one of the most thrilling rock
bands alive, the one that rock critics get hung up on is their
Pitchfork-baiting conceptual shtick. I am, perhaps unfortunately, no
different.
In case you’re just joining the party: Art Brut, literally “rough
art” or “raw art,” is a term coined to describe art produced by those
outside of traditional institutions. According to its own myths, rock
‘n’ roll is outsider art—informal, rebellious, decentralized,
proletarian. But in another way, rock ‘n’ roll is absolutely an
institution, with its own traditions and codes. Because of this
duplicity, rock ‘n’ roll artists are constantly scrutinized for things
like sincerity, irony, pretense, etc. Its outsiders champion their
status even as they try to force their way into the game; its insiders
struggle to appear genuine and green.
So when a band call themselves Art Brut (an insider’s term for an
outsider); debut with a song about the giddy, naive joy of forming a
band (while sneaking in non-naive references to the Smiths and taking
pains to declare, “It’s not irony/it’s not rock ‘n’ roll); and name
their debut album Bang Bang Rock & Roll, things get, well,
a bit complicated.
That debut record is brilliant, in no small part because of Eddie
Argos’s reflexive persona. The frontman posits himself as both insider
(sly, winking pop-cultural know-it-all) and outsider (wide-eyed
everyman rock ‘n’ roll fan), moching at the distinction in the process.
For every moment of sweet sincerity—the rollicking first-love
nostalgia of “Emily Kane,” the embarrassing sexual anxiety of “Rusted
Guns of Milan”—there’s a self-conscious aside about pop charts or
music magazines. Even the earnestly enthusiastic rush of the title
track contains sacrilegious digs at sex, drugs, and the Velvet
Underground.
The genius of Art Brut is that they tear down the barriers between
the inside and the out, between the self-aware and the sincere, with
total glee. Argos, who looks like he grew up watching too much Jarvis
Cocker on Top of the Pops (and really, you can’t get to “Emily
Kane” without the Deborah of “Disco 2000”), could be sincere about
reading the pop charts, or not; he might be calculating about revealing
relationship woes, or he might not be. You can’t tell what’s what, and
Art Brut make you feel silly for even trying, for caring about things
like intention when you should be busy rocking out.
But if Art Brut’s next-level pop rock is simultaneously studied and
sincere, it really isn’t irony. Rarely does one see a band
play with such genuine love, such unbounded enthusiasm. God, they even
have songs about how genuine their songs are—it’s like some kind
of musical M. C. Escher drawing. Can you even have a song about how
genuine your songs are? Can Argos demand, “No more songs about sex and
drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” in a song about those very things, just before
launching into the willfully stupid, rock-killing chorus, “Bang
bang/Rock ‘n’ roll”?
It’s the wrestling with these admittedly nerdy questions—to
the tune of a steady backbeat, some simple chord progressions, and a
slew of catchy riffs—that makes Art Brut so much more than merely
another great rock band (although, make no mistake, they are a fucking
great rock band).
With their recent sophomore album, It’s a Bit Complicated,
all us enamored rock critics, like myself, worried that Argos and
company would blow their tenuous charm trying to reproduce the novelty
of Bang Bang Rock & Roll‘s sincere meta pop. The conceit
of Bang Bang Rock & Roll was fantastic, but it would have
been impossible to pull off a sequel. If there’s anything to learn from
the Streets, it’s that people love conceptual albums about a regular
punter with grand aspirations, but they hate the victory record. So
rather than bore us with some ruminations about tour buses or the
summer festival circuit, Argos wisely retreats back to a kind of
prefame persona. The album abandons the self-referential routine in
favor of more prosaic songs about Argos’s everyman efforts at love, his
juvenile fandom of pop music, and the clashes thereof, with nary a
self-aware song about assembling rock combos, cracking the Top 40, or
relocating to entertainment-industry meccas (the only glimmer of their
old tricks comes via the cute breaking of the fourth wall in their
video for “Direct Hit”).
The irony is that it’s quite a bit less complicated than
its predecessor. And that’s exactly why it succeeds. 