Art Brut, Art Brut vs. Satan

At the end of the day, Art Brut just wouldn’t work without Eddie Argos. I mean no disrespect to the other members of the band, because they’re all fine musicians, and Art Brut vs. Satan is musically a finely-crafted pastiche of everything I love about Britpop from the past three decades or so, from the Elastica-ish start-stop rhythms to the excellently Clash-y guitars to the raw-yet-shiny Pulp sheen that covers everything. In terms of musicianship, Satan far outstrips the band’s previous releases — they may’ve recorded everything for this album in two weeks, but they sound like they worked their asses off to make it perfect.

That said, though, without Argos’s flat, spoken/muttered/yelped vocals and unashamedly neurotic lyrics, they’d be just another good Britpop band, instead of the jaw-dropping monster of a band they are, at least to me. Sure, his voice — he only rarely ever approaches “singing” in a traditional sense, coming off instead more like an across-the-pond Craig Finn — is probably a love-or-hate thing, and it definitely takes some getting used to, but the way he uses it just works the way it needs to.

For me — and, I suspect, a lot of other music lovers — Argos’s songs hit me right where I live, from the awesomely catchy celebration of childhood that is “DC Comics And Chocolate Milkshake” to the intensely sweet OCD-crush song “Am I Normal?” to the half-apology for singing a song under your breath in public, “Twist And Shout.” I mean, who hasn’t gone through their day with a song in their head, barely able to keep it from coming out — or, worse yet, unconsciously started to sing it aloud while riding up in the elevator, earning curious glances from fellow office-dwellers?

More than anything else, he’s a music fanatic who resembles a friendlier, less Comic Book Guy-ish composite of Dick and Barry from High Fidelity in his zeal (on this release, taking aim at bands that ape the U2 sound, the people in charge of charting record sales, and bands for whom music’s just a pose) and wonderment about bands and the songs they play. On top of that, though, Argos is seemingly also one of those people who’s got a set of distinct, immutable rules for everything, particularly music. See “What A Rush,” a morning-after song where he practically smacks himself in the forehead for brushing off the whole Stones vs. Beatles conundrum just to get a girl in bed, for proof.

He’s mawkishly intense and too thoughtful, obsessing and driving himself half-crazy with “what ifs” about everything under the sun. Argos is the kind of guy who’s so intent on seeing a crush that when he overhears her saying she’s going “to town,” he rides the bus to both towns nearby, in the hope of spotting her out shopping…but then he’s too afraid of the heartbreak to follow through.

Essentially, Eddie Argos is…well, he’s me. Or somebody like me, at any rate (and possibly somebody like you, too, since you’re reading this music-obsessive e-zine). He’s somebody who lives and breathes music, loves things he probably should’ve given up well before he hit the whole thirtysomething range, has a set of fairly fixed ideas of what good music should and shouldn’t be, and struggles with a crippling fear of being turned down by members of the opposite sex.

Put it all together, and Art Brut vs. Satan resembles the album you and your friends might create, given some musical talent, stitching all the things you care about into one big, messy, endearingly earnest, sometimes incoherent but always brilliantly personal ball of youthful fire and fury. Art Brut is a band of music fanatics, for music fanatics, with songs about music fanaticism, and they’ve hit their stride beautifully. To steal one of Argos’s own lines, from “The Replacements”: “I’m glad I’ve finally found a / band that’s not gonna let me down.” Amen.