plorentz's Full Review: Bang Bang Rock & Roll by Art Brut
In the early 80s, two guys named John saw the unlikely musical possibilities of a then-burgeoning entrepreneurial form - the 976 number - and put it to work for them. Their idea: get a common answering machine, hook it up to an ordinary phone line, and then write and record on that answering machine witty little tunes riffing most amusingly and cleverly on the day's popular culture, obscure political trends, and bizarre catch phrases. Advertise the phone number in local magazines and get your artistic message out while bypassing the lumbering record industry behemoth altogether. Thus Dial-A-Song, and They Might Be Giants were born. Of course, by the end of the decade, TMBG had grown from whimsy to cottage industry to mainstream (if not quite Top 40) establishment. In 1990, they released their major label debut, thereby obviating what had made them once seem so special. I love They Might Be Giants, and I continue to buy their records, but more than two decades and slews of less distinctive imitators since, their self-titled debut retains an absurd magic that their current records - as enjoyable as they are - can only pretend to...
Every town looks the same. It's one of the most common rock n' roll road song cliches - something They Might Be Giants might have lampooned back in '86 - but these days, when every city of a certain size boasts a similar set of chain and fast food restaurants, discount retailers, and big-box hardware and electronics stores, it's actually becoming true even to us non-rock-stars. Every time I visit a new city, it's harder and harder to tell if it's real or if it's franchise. But where many will bemoan this fact in long rants published in emphatically local, indie, alternative newsweeklies throughout the land, the British quintet that calls itself Art Brut, like John Linnell and John Flansburgh before them, have seized upon the musical possibilities of the epic Wal-Martization of the world encouraging their fans to start Art Brut franchises. They envision an Art Brut in every hip local music scene playing the same Art Brut songs any other Art Brut in any other city might play. An Art Brut on every corner. An Art Brut for every downtown club. Art Brut: Billions and Billions Served Daily.
These cheeky Brits (and are there any other kind?) freely admit that there is no "rockist" redemption in their mission. Even if this franchising scheme works - a joke that appears, for the moment, to have gotten a little out of hand (The Onion's AV club, in an apparently "real" bit of reporting, noted a bluegrass-flavored Art Brut based in West Virginia) - and in the unlikely case that, collectively, the various Art Bruts of the world ultimately do see a million faces, they are not likely to "rock them all" in the satisfyingly heroic Jon Bon Jovi sense. Instead, Art Brut win our addiction-prone hearts with a debut album - Bang Bang Rock N' Roll - chock full of trashy McNuggets of Brit-pop parody - songs full of artificial flavors and colors (most borrowed from the notoriously fickle pages of British music journals like NME - thus titles like "These Animal Menswe@r") - songs that have been cookie-cuttered into unhaphazardly haphazard shapes - that are nevertheless tasty and exciting in wholly unhealthy ways. Moreover, their music arrives packaged with the same kind of hollowed-out social concern with which McDonald's restaurants now cover their soft-drink cups with odes to physical fitness.
From the band's mission statement:
I want to be the man who writes the song that makes Israel and Palestine get along
I'm gonna write a song as universal as Happy Birthday
That's gonna make sure that everybody knows that everything's gonna be ok...
And we're gonna play it
Eight weeks in a row on Top of the Pops!
("Formed a Band")
Is it any wonder then that the album closes with the grotesquely platitudinous image of an Art Brut lead singer (any Art Brut lead singer) strolling through a maternity ward (any maternity ward) leading his band in an arena-rock singalong to all the little babies: "Everything's gonna be all right." It's nauseatingly cliched, and groan-inducingly hilarious in the same way intentionally bad bad writing is. Despite the band's Magritte-ish opening protestations that "this is not irony" and "this is not rock n roll", their debut album is actually both rolled up into each other, and rolled up again and again, like two hunks of differently colored Play-doh into one unnaturally pleasurable lump.
Sure, a song like "Modern Art" might describe an unusually visceral reaction to a painting by Henri Matisse - in the chorus the band shout and wail with Roky Erickson acid-trip intensity "Modern Art makes me want to rock out!" - but it's hard to dismiss the song as merely a joke about pretension artsy-fartsies. After all, the band is called Art Brut after an early 20th Century French art movement. But also, on a more personal level, I totally want to be a rock star every time I see an Anselm Keifer painting. I identify with this song in wholly unironic way.
Likewise, only the most vain (and deluded) among us guys will not grin in dorky empathy when the band plays "Rusted Guns of Milan", a power ballad from the point of view of a sexually disappointing guy, whose verses offer a pathetic (but ever-persevering) echo of the Little Engine That Could: I know I can, I know I can, I know I can, I know I can.
What keeps Art Brut from becoming insufferable - and with 15 tracks of rudimentary playing, primitive songwriting, and amelodic, heavily accented "talk-singing", insufferability seems a foregone conclusion here - is that underneath the many layers of irony, there's a genuine heart. "Emily Kane" might be convincingly read as a parody, but it's just as sweet and winning as any Kinks character portrait, circa 1966. And there's genuine joy in the single "Good Weekend", a celebration of a "brand new girlfriend" ("I've seen her naked! Twice!") which cops its central riff from "Cool Jerk" and still sounds like a vintage single by The Fall. This may not be the stuff of sustainable recording careers, but Bang Bang Rock N' Roll is magnificently endearing in the same way They Might Be Giants' debut was twenty years ago. And they're still cool.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Bang Bang Rock N Roll" by Art Brut
Downtown Records
Released 5/9/06
Produced by John Fortis
42 min.
SONGS: Formed a Band - My Little Brother - Emily Kane - Rusted Guns of Milan - Modern Art - Good Weekend - Bang Bang Rock N Roll - Fight! - Moving to L.A. - Bad Weekend - Stand Down - 18,000 Lira - These Animal Menswe@r - Really Bad Weekend - Maternity Ward
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