ART BRUT - Art Brut Vs. Satan

Two years after their previous "It's A Bit Complicated", the London-based Art Brut finally get around to releasing their hugely anticipated third album, produced and recorded in just under two weeks (as any sincerely punk band should) in the United States alongside Frank Black of the Pixies, prophet of American indie-rock and an avowed idol of the band. The result of this experiment, "Art Brut Vs. Satan" (a sly little dig at their majesties the Mogwai?), shows that the gradual move toward a more conventional song format begun on the 2007 record continues into these new compositions too, albeit at a slower pace than one might reasonably have expected. Which, all things considered, is no bad thing.

The songs keep clambering over disorderly patchworks of words and riffs cut up with gleeful primitivist carelessness; the attitude is punkier than usual, with guitars pounding away and arrangements that are raw and dry, with few concessions to any overly soft aesthetic of balance and harmony. Art Brut, as their very name suggests, put the spontaneist poetics of the gesture ahead of any notion of beautiful singing, which is why they so often come across as dissonant, grammatically chaotic and utterly unsingable. Much of the credit for this must go to singer/performer Eddie Argos, a thoroughly talkative and instantly likeable character, capable of attracting the unconditional devotion of a cluster of diehard disciples (on Facebook you can find groups along the lines of "Eddie Argos For President"), heir to a noble tradition of sharp humourists and sarcastic observers of British awkwardness running from Jerome K. Jerome to Jarvis Cocker, by way of Alan Bennett and Ray Davies.

As many have noted, the most obvious precedent for Art Brut are the Fall (though the band themselves only discovered them after journalists pointed out the undeniable resemblance), but Mark E. Smith's macabre, insulting irony is a far cry from Eddie Argos's, who prefers a kind of pseudo-university japery and playful wordplay full of mischievous, sniggering puns to any barbed, politically incorrect provocation.

Through his non-songs, Eddie Argos has thus managed to build a tragicomic persona around which a rich gallery of anecdotes and little stories has accumulated, poised somewhere between adolescent epic and the comic-strip banality of everyday life. This becomes all the more evident live, where the band officiates a kind of hilarious, dadaist liturgical ritual in which the audience identifies completely with the words screamed from the stage (not unlike what happens, in a slightly different way, with Offlaga Disco Pax).

On the new album we move from an unhealthy devotion to drink (the cry of "Portatemi un caffè!" bellowed on "Alcoholics Unanimous" describes an unpleasant situation each of us has found ourselves in at least once in our lives...) to an incurable passion for big American superhero comics ("Dc Comics And Chocolate Milkshake"), crossing paths with bus-stop sociology ("The Passenger") and evergreen arguments about musical taste ("What A Rush"). The sonic touchstones range from the Buzzcocks to Richard Hell, by way of the nursery-rhyme simplicity of early Jonathan Richman, the cabaret punk of the Monochrome Set and the intellectual situationism of Chumbawamba, but one of the most obvious sources is surely the action theatre of Europe's early avant-gardes, somewhere between Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Hugo Ball.

The closing "Mysterious Bruises" (which shatters the ideological four-minute barrier by stretching out past seven) edges even toward some vague notion of progressive spoken word, pointing to possible directions for future exploration.

Overall, the album offers a formula that's already well established in the band's past work, and the least one can say about a case like this is that a group with Art Brut's characteristics is certainly not built for half measures: you either love them blindly or you can't stand them at all. The band's records and songs tend to fall within a subculture of fans-turned-devotees who already know, even before the needle drops, that they'll love whatever is put in front of them. To the uninitiated this might seem fairly baffling and arbitrary, yet the band has undeniably managed to build a coherent poetics of its own and a small, reference-dense myth that almost always ends up grabbing your attention and wringing out a sly smirk of satisfaction.

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19/04/2009