ART BRUTArt Brut vs. Satan
(Downtown)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)
There are few frontmen in rock less concerned about appearing cool than Art Brut’s Eddie Argos. Art Brut vs. Satan (as produced by Frank Black) is almost a concept album in which each song is designed to strip Argos of another layer of hipster credibility: on “The Passenger,” he admits that he never learned to drive and willingly takes the bus everywhere (“I love public transportation/Train or bus, they’re both amazing”); on “Am I Normal?” he describes having a crush on a pretty girl in his school and running away every time he had a chance to speak to her; and on “The Replacements,” he makes the most embarrassing admission of them all — he’d never heard of Paul Westerberg’s seminal indie rock band until just last year.
Like Jonathan Richman, Argos is the rare songwriter without a pretentious bone in his body. He sings about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, but the sloppy, embarrassing parts: taking too many pills, making a fool of himself at parties, waking up in bed with girls he doesn’t even like. He’s a master of the rhyming couplet: “I don’t know how I managed to do this/But I woke up this morning covered in bruises. “Life is especially hard/When no one trusts you with a credit card.” “Why is everyone trying to sound like U2?/That’s not a very cool thing to do.”
There’s that word “cool” again. Well, Argos will never be cool like Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits or even Bono, but he’s a better songwriter than any of them.
0 Yorumlar