Is It So Wrong to See Art Brut and The Hold Steady? (Tempe; 11.09.2007) Nov 11 '07    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Music Revelation [Digipak] by Journey From $12 Machine Gun Etiquette by The Damned From $40 The Bottom Line useless smart routes lead to tempe, glistening Phoenix, the big city with the stupid music market, right? It wouldn't be hard to come to that conclusion looking at the lack of exciting indie acts coming to town. It's not a challenge to find a hardcore show, or some two-bit punk band coming a dime a dozen, but this is the place traditionally passed-over by, most recently, bands like TV On The Radio, The National, Iron & Wine, and many other uber-cool bands. A smart band looks on a map, sees Austin, sees Denver, sees Los Angeles, and sees a whole lot of road in between, but seemingly sees little potential in Phoenix. However, due to up-and-coming status, the hipsters and left-wingers and artsy folk from all walks are starting to abandon the dead markets of the midwest and east in favor of the Valley of the Sun, and sooner or later, please believe me, we will no longer be the dumbest state in the United States of America (no really, trust me, we are). I'd like to thank a mix of these people and college students in my favorite valley city, Tempe, for just being here, so I could see The Hold Steady and Art Brut rock out last night. And I beg, please, more of you conscientious angel-faced loves, please come soon! Mill Avenue rips right through campus and to a large strip of bars and debauchary, and it's so picturesque this time of year, 70s on show night with big trees in bright white lights lining all of the usual weekend festivities. Tempe is more than a college town, it's an idea town in the midst of a still quite conservative southwest area. No matter your age, you can find a place, and the brilliance of it leads to the Marquee on the other side of now-black from night Tempe Town Lake, where it isn't just 20 year old cool kids and scenesters, but a little bit of everything. 20-somethings dominate, yes, but I'll be damned if your mom and pops weren't there two nights ago, in the big hollowed-out warehouse that is the rockin'-est of Tempe's venues. After I grabbed my red Hold Stead tee and the new Art Brut CD, the post-punkin' whirl of fun "It's A Bit Complicated", smoked a rare square and bs'd with my concert-mate Kim and her friend during the seemingly negligible first act, what's their name, I found my spot along the rail, because if I stand behind anyone I will hit them with elbows and chest bumps and then nobody will be happy, we all fall down! It was the odd occasion of having the set-up act not being so far behind the popularity of the headliner. Hardly an upstart, Art Brut has two quality albums under their belt and a rep for being a killer onstage act with frontman Eddie Argos working the crowd over with charisma and wonderful rants on love and living the gone life. The Hold Steady took a chance following them up. Perhaps too much so, as it would seem on this night in November. - - - art and eddie should have come with confetti It stated plainly at the merch table on a little printed-out sign that Art Brut refused to sell t-shirts due to the 28% the Marquee charged them on all merch sold, which they said would cause them to raise their prices, and they were just not willing to do that, to rip-off their fans. Then it beckoned for us to still grab a $10 CD. I liked that. I knew, then, that all the rumors were true: that Art Brut was even more a band of the people than it appeared from their debut, one of the best releases of '05, "Bang Bang Rock and Roll". Let's begin at the end, the final rant of many that Eddie Argos went through, where he was yelling over the instrumental to the first gasp of their first album, "Formed a Band", how Art Brut was having such ridiculous fun and it should be obvious to all of us and how we should form bands because we should be having so much fun, too. He was sweating mad, passionate, but light at heart like he loved the whole lot of us, genuinely, for how could you fake such a thing over and over to get the exemplerary live reviews this quartet has? What makes Art Brut geniuses of the stage is that there is no genius to it at all. They are a post-punk rock group who are just plain honest. Their drummer, Mikey Breyer, is so damned excited and wild he won't sit down, doesn't even have a stool if he wanted to. Eddie Argos, on recording, rants as much as he sings, or more, and it's prosaic in its unapologetic straight-forward heartedness. On stage he walks back and forth, jumps around like a kid on Christmas getting that new game system, does push-ups, goes off on a five minute story/rant on love and girls, runs into the crowd and jumps all over the damn place with the people, runs back on stage and never lets off. He must have made eye-contact with every person there. He was our Eddie, this was our band, for just one night. As for actual recordings translating to on-stage performances, well it all goes hand-in-hand, because not one song slowed it down or lacked energy. Even the more sunshiny, less BPM, "People In Love", was dance-able and fun on the chorus, and Eddie's mouth ran and ran and his humor was plain from the chorus, "To every girl whose ever been with me...I've got over you all...eventually", to the ensuing stories he'd tell. "Bad Weekend" is one of their darker numbers, and it had the people who knew it bouncing off the walls, and eventually much of the crowd was up to chanting the made-for-live-performance chorus, "Popular culture no longer applies to me". And actually, for the set-up, there was more people than you'd think yelling out lyrics, from the innocence-retained teen love story, "Emily Kane", to the opener and ever-witty "Pump Up the Volume", where Argos goes off about needing to go away from a kiss to turn up a pop song, ode to the audiophiles. Yes, the recordings simply must have had the stage in mind, and Art Brut must have had their fans in mind, because they played everyone's favorites, no one was left hanging. Not even those begging all show to hear "Good Weekend", the song that, as the band joked, reached number one in all the countries without Top of the Pops, and did drum rolls to announcing its former top spot in Mexico, Portugal, and others. We had all been waiting to hear Eddie yell, about his brand new girlfriend, "I've seen her naked...TWICE!" and we were not disappointed. Thank you sir. Fun. I don't know what else to say. Another week of teaching these middle schoolers down and I should've had no gas in the tank, but I was sweating from all the jumping and needed water so so badly when Art Brut left the stage. If The Hold Steady could even match the vigor and joy that Art Brut brought to the masses of the Marquee, it would be one of the most fulfilling concerts I'd been to in Arizona. Well, then again, just listening to "Direct Hit" off of the latest Art Brut right now, what can I say? Even with less than greatness from our main act, it still was oh so delicious. - - - boys and girls in america, whaddya think? Kim just hyped the living daylights out of The Hold Steady's live performance last June in downtown Phoenix. I was in Chicago bumming around and enjoying my summer on Lake Michigan, and all I kept getting were voicemails that night of all these different Hold Steady live snippets. That show was at the more intimate setting of the Brickhouse, one of those places where you can touch the tennis shoes of the people you're watching. For a band who plays some bar rock, be a highly intellectual version, this would seem to make sense. But they have plenty of songs that rock well enough for the Marquee. Or so I thought. When it comes to it, The Hold Steady have two albums that they play off of, 2005's "Separation Sunday" and 2006's "Boys and Girls In America", and as we'd see, the latter worked live far, far, far better than the former. The kick-off of "Party Pit", a lovedrug of a song, full of lust and highs and total out of it stuff with vibrant piano and a guitar explosion on the chorus, then "Stuck Between Stations", a true fan favorite with all sorts of big city Kerouac prose, sad but exciting, really started us on a lift, lead-singer Craig Finn smiling and sweating all the way. A little guy, Finn came out maniac-like, and kept going, singing a line, then pulling the mic down to repeat it to the crowd like he was letting us in on some inside joke nobody got. He's an artist. Where we go flat is on a song like "Multitude of Casualties", a mid-tempo rocker that sounds fine on CD, does nothing for you at a show. Can't wave lighters, can't bump around, and considering this and most else on "Separation Sunday" is more ranting/less singing, you can't really sing-along unless you have the lyrics down that well. I guess I just don't see the point in playing songs where you can't do at least one of those three things. "Cattle and Creeping Things" was a song for what Craig would call "old school" fans, but again it's a "Sunday" song, and it's far better, more interesting, on record. And let me be straight, "Separation Sunday" is a fine album, but it's highly philosophical and, again, rant-filled, with obscure characters and the guitars aren't so upbeat or aggressive as you'd like when you are at a live show. "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" would be the lone exception, with an anticipation-filled verse that leads into a romping chorus that's too fun to scream into the face of the performer, "I've been dusted in the dark up in Penetration Park, and I've been plastered / I've been shaking all and searchin' in a dirty store-front church and I've been plowed / But I ain't never been with your little hoodrat friend (repeated 4x)". Now, those are the type of songs you need anchoring your live show! When I really started leaning against my rail, though, was during some of the new numbers they went through. Unreleased material. Were they bad songs? I don't know, the lyrics were tough to pick out of the guitars, but if it's any indicator, the new material doesn't seem as colorful as the brilliant "Boys and Girls In America". I felt sleep come into my eyes. Thankfully they did get back into "Boys and Girls". I was hoping for them to at least blows us away with a live rendition of the acoustic "Citrus", but while that never happened, "Massive Nights" had the crowd all in a tizzy as we echoed the "oh oh OH oh"s against the chant of, what else, "We've had some massive nights!" These drug-infested songs really had us going, man. "Southtown Girls" was another one where the hook is so amazingly addicting, especially with the beat somber harmony, everyone had to be screaming, "Southtown girls won't blow you away, but you know that they'll stay", but surprisingly a lot of people had down the direction to the drug spot that Craig sings on the verse, too, so there was more camaraderie here than you'd expect. As encore, we were treated to a heart-caressing version of "First Night", the sweet, sweet ballad from "Boys and Girls", where our character Holly, "Said words alone never could save us, and cried when she told us about Jesus." The breakdown at the end was nirvana, and you couldn't ask for much more. Sad thing, it's only been two nights, and I can't even recall the final song. It was a bit of snoozer, especially when I think that five months ago in Phoenix they left on the appropriate "How a Ressurection Really Feels", a country-ish indie rock jam that leaves you feeling whole, and could've mended this concert and sent me out ready to rave. Instead, I can't recall the finale, so whatever. The Hold Steady have, like Art Brut, built a reputation as being high-level performers, so perhaps they weren't feeling the crowd, or were just on an off night. Their biggest successes were with the "Boys and Girls In America" songs, which are more melodic, more available for sing-alongs, and to be quite truthful, more interesting. And more people know them. I still must say, though, I had a fantastic time, letting loose like nothing before during songs like "Stuck Between Stations" and "Your Little Hoodrat Friend", and I still managed to sweat more and be dehydrated and to fall in love with the lights and the guitars and half-intoxicated icons in front of me once again. - - - nag you OK people, there is more to this Arizona place than the University of Arizona and empty space for you to travel on. Arizona State, Tempe, and Downtown Phoenix, happening places! We have our art walk going regularly now on First Fridays. Educated people are coming. So bring on your indie rock, you'll make money. You should've seen the crowd at the Regina Spektor show at the Orpheum Theater the Sunday previous, there was a ton of people enjoying that dazzling, awe-inspiring show. Don't be scurrrred, we're ready to blow up! To you readers out there, look into this litte Art Brut band. I mean, they'll still be having an absolute ball if you don't, but you should, they should be rich off of this, they're just the type of guys you root for. As for The Hold Steady, well, they were outshined on this particular night, but they aren't just some band to disregard, the hype they produced with last year's "Boys and Girls In America" is utterly worthwhile. If you aren't sure, I'd download "Nag Nag Nag Nag" off the new Art Brut, and "Stuck Between Stations" off of the latest Hold Steady, and find out for yourself. As for me, well, I'll be waiting impatiently for the next big act to stop through my ever-expanding valley.

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