yes, that's right. saw art brut last night after falling mildly in love with them sometime this summer, likely after being stuck in the car with some pitchfork writers on the way up to mutek.
in the crowded, not quite ideal venue confines of Tribeca Grand's basement (which feels often more like a sweaty wedding afterhours sesh when all the 'grownups' go home and the DJ turns out to have better jams then "brown eyed girl-lady in red-wonderful tonight" medley, which makes it sort of better than a REAL nightclub, tho Dave P's Philly home is a little more suited to the grime and glitter nature of these events) Art Brut came out: playing the intro to Welcome to the Jungle, no less.
I ran into their booking agent, who I once shared a bunkbed with at an indie rock retreat in college, who informed me that they were "really excited to go to LA" after I told him "Move to LA" was one of their weaker songs...Ehh.
Anyway, the lead singer Eddie Argos looks like an overdone Shakespearean actor with his rouged cheeks and unibrow - he's uniquely ugly in a way that made me hope he had the stage presence of David Byrne. He doesn't, but his banter "we just got a new guitarist, we're told he's the only attractive one in the band" was endearing enough. Thing is, Art Brut is something like the punk rock version of BARR - inspirational self-concious DIY creation that both exposes and questions its being and attempts to incite the audience to join in, since they've set the bar so low. How do you begin? Begin!, brendan would say. Eddie Argos is more typically British. "I will be coming back to New York City in the unforeseeable future, and when I do I am going to walk around, go into the subway, and find every single one of you and I am going to ask you, 'have you formed a band' and if you say no, I am going to be. I am going to be...very....disappointed."
Argos asked each of the band to take solos as he introduced them, in the last song: each member sucked in a way that suggested maybe they were trying a little too hard to suck. The show is Argos, who sing-speaks through the set as a pomo rock god jester not unlike Jarvis C. before he went capital A art. It is this year's best meta-rock, by far. That Nickelback song about being a rock star? The worst.