Art Brut's new EP "Pump Up The Volume" is apparently available on ITunes now, and not before time... in my view, this would have made much more sense as the first single from the "It's a Bit Complicated" album, and had it actually been scheduled as the first outing the CD might have broken the Top 75 at least.

In the meantime, here's the video, apparently shot in Sydney. Top quality stuff.

I returned to the ULU last night for the first time since I tried to host an ill-fated gig night there. Nothing's changed there in the last two and half years - though I'm not too sure what I was expecting.

Happily, this time I was there to see Art Brut live, which is always a treat. On this occasion, their support band were rather more baffling, however. I Human in terms of appearance seemed like a perplexing supergroup, an amalgamation of different members of different bands from conflicting genres. Up front, a long haired lead singer who looked like Chris Morris doing an impression of Jim Kerr out of Simple Minds rocked out. Next to him stood a gurning, attention seeking bass player flicking his fringe and making pouting mirror faces to the audience. Further back, a slightly fey looking female keyboard player smiled away, looking like she'd lost her way to the rehearsals of a slightly more twee band. Musically too, they were utterly confusing, attempting modern commerical alternative rock styled covers of "Horse With No Name" (which I never want to hear again, incidentally, restyled or otherwise) and screeching and shouting just when you thought they'd settled into a New Order cloned pattern of things.

For all the internal contradictions, there was nothing jarring or disturbing about them, and possibly nothing of any major value either. When a band introduce so many distractions into the grand scheme of things, it's hard to focus enough to give a valuable judgement. As a music journo, I would obviously have some tapes, vinyl or CDs to also base my judgement on. As a blogger, I'm stuck with the live show alone, and frankly I'm stumped. The only observation I can make is that I sense a psychological conflict within the outfit - the bass player was edging dangerously close to the mic stand at times. My expert opinion here based upon band body language is that either the bass player will be the lead singer of the band in three months time, or the lead singer will have kicked him out. Trust me, I know these things. I'd advise them both to proceed with caution.

I've written about Art Brut before, of course, but there's no harm in doing so again - in fact, unlike many bands, I've been coming to the conclusion that they are worthy of much further analysis than the usual "What a great laugh they are!" descriptions that get tossed off. We're at a point in rock history now where falling back upon ancient, almost 1950s cliches seems not to be criticised as much as it once was, and the stagnation that has resulted has been inevitable. Posturing, preening, and taking one's self far too seriously as the most conservative kind of rebel has been the accepted norm even at the lowest end of the pub circuit, and whenever somebody like Pete Doherty has come along to try and play with the accepted cliches and twist them slightly, they've just been sucked back into the vortex with everyone else. Rock has become inflexible, corporate, and now even taught in special colleges up and down Britain. Who would have thought it, eh?

If Pete Doherty exists at one end of the spectrum, then - a serious figure trying to see what mileage he can get out of the cliches, and how much he can flex and warp them - Eddie Argos is at the opposite end, simplifying, mocking and deconstructing. Due to this, it's easy to dismiss Art Brut casually with the word "novelty", but there's much more going on than that. The debut single "Formed a Band" could be viewed as a casual flippant joke, or a slightly subversive piece of nastiness. Shouting "Look at us! We formed a band!" as the chorus to any track is reductive and mocking, which is the reason it's so amusing in the first place. After all, anyone can form a band and be glorified within their drinking circles or school playground - but it's not actually a particularly difficult thing to do. The hard part is approaching it with any sense of originality, of not adding to the volumes of cloning garbage that litter the Record and Tape Exchange, or not ending up seeing out your middle age on retro revival tours.

Then there's the subject matter running throughout their other tracks. Where others sing about love, Eddie Argos sings about erectile dysfunction. I try to remember the last track I heard about this topic, and believe it was probably Elastica's "Stutter", where Justine Frischmann played the purring pussy cat egging her lover on to 'get it up', as it were. So, she was playing the rock and roll vixen whilst her lover was hopeless - the accepted hedonistic thing to write about. Eddie Argos, on the other hand, is the man with the limp penis singing about it in depth, and even recounting when and where it happened, and with who. Rock stars do not sing about how crap they've been in bed. This is against the rules. Especially in the present scene where every skinny white male secretly wishes to be as sexy as Puff Diddy, whether they admit it or otherwise.

The last time I saw them live, Eddie Argos ranted at the audience (between hiccups of laughter) about how pathetic they were for living their lives through bands and musicians. "Don't listen to bands!" he roared. "They're stupid! They're just showing off! They can't help you with anything!" He didn't do it again last night, which I thought was a shame - it seemed to encapsulate the appeal of Art Brut very well. They're an extremely entertaining and very visual live band who have effectively, possibly even accidentally, subverted a lot of the notions of what it means to be in a band, turning the norms on their head. They may not be the future of music, and I'll actually be surprised if the limited template they've set for themselves means they even manage to spit out another album, but somewhere within the silliness and the buffoonery there are slight flickers of where rock lyrics might go if the form is to survive to the end of the century keeping everyone interested. This is as far from the Brit school as things get, almost as if they've found the course guidance notes and decided to approach things in completely the opposite direction.

Oh, and they're extraordinarily entertaining as well, which obviously helps no end.

I hope all you lot out there in Internetland are having joyful Fridays - I'm not particularly, as I have two departmental meetings today and also a huge report I've got to get finished before hometime, but this video for Art Brut's "Direct Hit" single cheered me up, and it might do you too:



Great video, but a truly baffling choice of single as it's not even in the upper 50% of the tracks on the "It's A Bit Complicated" album in terms of quality. "Pump Up The Volume" would have been a much more obvious choice of 45, and might have acted as a better promotional teaser for the long player and even (heaven forfend) have got them some airplay and a Top 40 single.

Situations like this baffle me. Sometimes I wonder how much better Suede's "Dog Man Star" might have done in the UK if anything but the utterly mediocre "We Are The Pigs" had been the first single off it. "The Wild Ones" could easily have crossed over into the Top Ten as a comeback outing and changed the dynamic of that particular segment of the band's career, and even "New Generation" wouldn't have caused so many furrowed brows. How do people in record companies think up release schedules? Do they just throw album tracklistings on the floor these days and throw darts at them, only disqualifying the thirty second instrumental interludes from single release?

Art Brut are a weird kettle of fish, aren’t they? They’ve spent so long telling us that they’re the outsiders of the music industry, the band formed by fans of other bands, that they’ve become cemented in everyone’s minds as being just that. The problem is, they’re not anymore – the Astoria in London was easily sold out last night, as over a thousand fans jammed themselves into the sweaty, grimy establishment to pay their respects. They’re the outsiders who have crept under the floorboards and popped their heads into the charts by accident, the band that hundreds of thousands of fans around Europe seem to still think of as being “under the radar”.

Before Eddie Argos and his fellow oddballs took the stage, however, Ciccone propped up the bill as support, playing their last ever gig. Ciccone are distracting for two reasons – firstly, they sound uncannily similar to a band I used to be in seven years ago, except, in my humble and considered opinion, not as good. Thus I spend most of their set stroking my chin and thinking to myself “Ooh, we wouldn’t have gone about it that way”. The second distraction is that their bass player looks rather like Paul McCartney in a certain light, a passing resemblance that is only accentuated by his periodic face-pulling, gurning and nodding to other members of the band. Once these two things clear from my brain, however, I find myself enjoying their set. It’s all very jolly abrasive guitar pop, although the band at times seem as distracted as I am, perhaps by the people slowly milling into the venue, and strangely subdued for what should be an emotional last gig. Isn’t this the time you’re supposed to set off fireworks, strip to your underwear or throw things into the audience? Instead they shuffle off at the end with a half-hearted goodbye. Oh well. It was nice knowing them, and apparently most of them will be back in a new guise soon.

Vincent Vincent and the Villains are a band I was previously aware of and actually quite unimpressed by, but in a live environment they truly shine. Whilst their reference points are overwhelmingly obvious, taking in the hiccupping, moaning vocal styles and tremolo guitar noises of the fifties and the choppy, angular guitar work of the C86 movement, they do manage to create a noise that sounds quite uniquely their own (even if their final slow number does almost encroach into Chris Isaak territory). They even look the part, seeming like the type of lads you’d have seen outside the Ritz Cinema in the fifties, posing for black and white photographs and smoking roll-ups. Whatever you think of the music, and it most certainly won’t appeal to the majority of listeners, they definitely know how to strike a memorable pose.

Art Brut, unfortunately for everyone else on the bill, are probably one of the best live bands in Britain at the moment, and have forged a career out of being the playground idiots of the music industry. Eddie Argos lacks grace and is a very awkward looking chap indeed, but as opposed to disguising this instead accentuates his shortcomings, seeming like some physical cross between Jarvis Cocker, Tiny Tim and Freddie Garrety in his onstage behaviour – swirling the mic around, finger-pointing into the audience and dancing in a cumbersome manner.

All this would count for little by itself apart from novelty if the band hadn’t grown from their slightly ramshackle, indier-than-thou roots into a very convincing proposition. Behind the superb and witty lyrical observations (Take “I’ve nothing for my friends but envy and hatred/ how many girls have they seen naked?” for starters) also lies some very sharp and jagged yet powerful pop melodies. Where the first album “Bang Bang Rock and Roll” seemed to owe a debt to the art-punk outfits of yore, the next one seems to have its shoes rooted more firmly in base-camp Britpop, which will either prove to be their making or undoing. Judging by the sheer volume of people in the audience, I’d say it’s looking more like the former at the moment. “Pump up the Volume” in particular will probably end up becoming an indie disco anthem before the year’s out.

Rather touchingly, Eddie Argos does a loud roll-call of forgotten and brilliant flop bands at the end of his set, roaring out “David Devant and His Spirit Wife! Top of the Pops! Animals That Swim! Top of the Pops!” thereby reminding the large audience of their influences and also who he thinks their peers are. It marks them out, once again, as knowingly different – Jeff Buckley, Radiohead and Nirvana do not even warrant mentions. As brilliant as this moment is (and I’m the only person who seems to cheer for Animals That Swim) it does remind me of a thought I’ve had before – if Art Brut had been around between 1994 – 1996, would I actually have bought any of their records or cared much? If they’d been around in a period where lyrical sharpness was expected, and was not the exception to the general rule, and where fantastic albums by The Tindersticks, The Divine Comedy, Pulp, Radiohead, Scott Walker, Jack, The Fall, Animals That Swim, and Earl Brutus had crash-landed on to the shelves of record stores amongst many others, would I actually have bothered to shell out cash for them? It’s difficult to say, but something causes me to doubt it. The great thing about them at the moment is that their lack of posturing po-facedness and their willingness to go out on a lyrical limb make them stand out, and they plug a gaping hole in the present lazy, identikit, fashion-conscious “alternative” scene. If they’re going to mean anything to anyone at all in four years time and not become the next Frank and Walters*, however, I’d say there’s still some work to be done. For the time being, they’ll do as they are, and at least they leave you with a big soppy grin on your chops and a tune spinning round on repeat cycle in your head.

(*That’s not such a terrible or inaccurate comment, by the way – if I was going to be insulting, I’d have said Kingmaker, who in turn have much more in common with Razorlight).