Introducing Art Brut & Everybody Was in the French Resistance…Now
Art Brut is an English and German indie rock band which I discovered via a side project of one of their members, Eddie Argos, who formed a band with Dyan Valdés from The Blood Arm called Everybody Was In The French Resistance…NOW. He and Valdes just put out an album called Fixin’ the Charts (Volume 1), which is apparently a collection of responses to particular pop songs, and from the moment I heard “G.I.R.L.F.R.I.E.N (You Know I’ve Got A)”, a single from it, I was hooked with a capital H.”“G.I.R.L.F.R.I.E.N (You Know I’ve Got A)” is a response to, you guessed it, Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend”.
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Here is their insanely cool album cover-
I haven’t listened to the rest of the album as yet, but you can check out the Stereogum Fixin’ the Charts premiere article and a (negative) review from LineofBestFit (like I said, I haven’t listened to the album yet, but I’m interested to see if I agree with his criticisms), and you can also can buy it from Amazon or Itunes. The Amazon description goes as such: “2010 debut from the British outfit featuring Eddie Argos from Art Brut and Dyan Valdes from The Blood Arm. Everybody Was In The French Resistance…Now are correcting the mistakes of Pop songs past. So far, they have defended the belittled blue-collar worker from Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger,’ told Gerry And The Pacemakers that, in fact, it is okay to walk alone, dumped the manipulative Martha Reeves on behalf of poor Jimmy Mack and have taken the misguided instructions of a 17th century ballad to its logical conclusion. They are ‘fixing the charts’!”
This led me in turn to check out Art Brut itself, and while I think overall I prefer Everybody Was In The French Resistance…NOW(and yes, every one of those words should be capitalized, and yes, that last “now” should be in caps, before you ask), Art Brut itself is also quite interesting. Their debut album, Bang Bang Rock & Roll, was released on 30 May 2005, with its follow up, It’s a Bit Complicated, released on 25 June 2007. Their name comes from a kind of outsider art, “art brut”, defined by French painter Jean Dubuffet’s as art by prisoners, loners, the mentally ill, and other marginalized people, and made without thought to imitation or presentation.
I hate their music videos but it can’t be helped so here goes-
Review: (most of which can also be applied to Everybody Was In The French Resistance…NOW) The good first – they’re funky and funny, aggressively cheeky and offbeat, a bit in-your-face and always tongue-in-cheek. What they have essentially done is taken an original concept(I’ve never quite heard their brand of screamo-tinged angst, conversational-rock-not-quite-rap-rhythms, and sarcastic societal commentary before) and having found what they with some reason consider to be a good thing, run with it quite consistently. The bad – I would categorize the band overall as a an excellent mix-seasoner(ie one or two Art Brut tracks per playlist) rather than a consistently pleasing artistic effort, because once the novelty wears off their songs all sound pretty much the same. There’s only so much clever-but-angry almost-screamo I can take at one time, and while I am very much a lyrics-focused person, when I’m forced to fall back on lyrics alone to differentiate between songs which all have essentially the same rhythm and beat, I begin to think that perhaps the songs are too intensely lyrics-driven. Despite my appreciation of their musical playfulness and innovation, it feels as if Art Brut got lazy once they’d invented their own particular musical style, applied it haphazardly and without restraint to all their songs, and then settled down to write clever lyrics (hint: the “without thought to presentation” aspect of art brut only works if you’re making music for purely self-indulgent purposes). The result is that more often than not the lyrics get lost in the dominant choruses. Also, Art Brut faces the danger of any band with anger as a part of its repertoire – that the line between angry and whiny is very, very, very thin. It has been the undoing of many a more brilliant group than this one. If they can learn to tone down and focus their admittedly exciting brand of energetic sarcasm, they could become something great (or at least good).
Having said all that, Art Brut is delightfully offbeat group and I will certainly keep an eagle eye on them in future (they remind me, inexplicably, of Flight of the Conchords, a group whose brand of cheery-instead-of-angry societal mockery and constantly-morphing playfulness Art Brut could do well to take a page from).
Up first: Wrigely’s Big Red. I wasn’t too sure if I liked this the first time I tried it – it’s faintly spicy and I generally don’t like spicy things. But then I realized that it’s just spicy enough to thoroughly wake me up without being so spicy that my tender mouth can’t handle it. Big Red is my friend and has gotten me through many a boring class section(and who doesn’t like cinnamonflavor?). I highly recommend this brand.
I cannot decide what I think of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was given to me as a birthday present and is therefore required reading. It is both elusive and precise, disturbing and faintly comforting. It took me a good four chapters to pin down the literary style which it reminded me of – magical realism, which I’ve encountered most strikingly before in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s brilliant novels(which is not to say I particularly like magical realism as a literary style or form – in fact I am ambivalent about it, having both my doubts and appreciations of it). While it is is not necessarily a pure or even extreme example of that form, being grounded in a domesticity and precise character development which makes the book as much the chronicle of a marriage as the story of a series of fantastical events, it is certainly a tale in which the world we live in and its realities are loosely defined and constantly changeable. The hero, Toru Okada, an unemployed former legal assistant, is living a life made up of small details – tasks such as cooking, laundry, and taking care of the cat – which give his life order and meaning while his wife works. It is also these small things which first begin to go awry, beginning with the cat, which goes missing just previous to the book’s opening. In his search for the cat (driven by his wife’s almost frenetic concern, because for her it is a symbol of something – their marriage, perhaps), Okada comes across other odd or missing things, such as his polka-dot tie which was left at the cleaners six months before and is miraculously (and inexplicably) still there, or the macabre young woman who lives on his street and subtly entices him with her unpredictability, or the mysterious voice which calls him on the phone and invites him to phone sex. A thread running through all of this is the presence of the wind-up bird, an unseen being in the tree near their house which announces the arrival of each day by emitting sounds like a spring winding up. It is his meeting with a medium hired by his wife’s brother which serves as somewhat of a turning point in the novel, however, and from there, Okada gradually stumbles into a world in which nothing makes sense. The fantastical, the odd, and the downright ridiculous(the medium wears an outdated vinyl hat) exist side by side with the mundane and ordinary(cooking, eating, phone calls with his wife), and in that juxtaposition, Marukami builds up a constantly-increasing sense of menace. As Okada finds himself frantically searching for his wife along with the cat, his perceptions of reality and the ordinary are constantly challenged and erased, as he searched through a world grown suddenly labyrinthine. He is plagued by a sense that invisible powers beyond his control are moving him like a puppet.