Brilliant! Tragic!
Rating: 4.1/5.0
Label: Cooking Vinyl
On Art Brut vs. Satan, Eddie Argos and company finally dispelled any doubt of the band's legitimacy. Which is the sort of thing you need to do when you're under suspicion of being a novelty act. If it wasn't already clear from the get-go, subsequent releases have established that the band's style (loud/shouty) is a viable method of delivering music to the ears, but for those who doubted its sustainability, Brilliant! Tragic! offers this message: "Fuck you, we can expand."
The hyperbolically titled Brilliant! Tragic! finds producer Frank Black (Francis) teaming with the group once again, making Art Brut one of the few British bands who can venture into the States and not completely amputate what made them special to begin with (see: the Arctic Monkeys). They make for a great pair, because Art Brut looks to sound like a band and not a slick and mechanical facsimile of music, while Black (if the last album was any indication) wants these guys to be as loud as fucking possible.
Brilliant! Tragic! features a lot of vintage Art Brut moments, launching into the music rant "Clever Clever Jazz" (surely inspired by a questionable opening act at one of the band's shows) and peppering the rest of the record with ditties like the "Emily Kane"-esque nostalgia song "Martin Kemp Welch Five-a-Side Football Rules!" (which even has the singsong vocals of some Bang Bang Rock & Roll tracks) and "Axel Rose," a tribute song in the vein of their eponymous Replacements tribute song off the last record. "I want to give the world a finger/ With the exception of my favorite lead singer," Argos shouts. Gotta love the lack of false advertising in the song title.
Musically, the band mostly continues the loud punkiness of Art Brut vs. Satan while spicing it up with departures like the weirdly seductive "Sexy Sometimes," where the band goes surf rock-tinged Modern Life Blur while Argos affects a Jarvis Cocker sex whisper about how he wants to make a smooth fuck-song. Speaking of Jarvis, Argos goes full-on jealous lover in "Bad Comedian." "How can you bear to hold his hand/ I bet he signs his name in Comic Sans/ He's a bad comedian/ I don't know what you see in him," sounds suspiciously like a thinly veiled diatribe against that bloke that got to the Greek.
Art Brut's always been capable of kind of sweetness, but they go full-on tender (well, as tender as the band ever gets) with "Sealand," which uses as a big gooey relationship metaphor the infamous British sea fort that claims itself a sovereign nation, even though nobody's bothered to recognize it as such. With background "la-la-las" and a reference to one of the band's earlier songs, "People in love lie around and get fat/ I think I'm okay with that."
Eddie Argos has always been the heart of the band and a clear voice in it, so a new release from Art Brut is like getting a new novel by an author whose perspective you identify with. The band, then, would be the lovely stinging prose that makes the work a page-turner. Moreover, Art Brut show exactly how to deliver a characteristically great record - by making the type of music they're known for while expanding on their signature sound to make their newest release distinct from all the ones that came before. The only way Brilliant! Tragic! could be better is if it had an album cover by Jamie McKelvie. OH WAIT.
by Danny Djeljosevic
Key Tracks: Clever Clever Jazz, Bad Comedian, Sexy Sometimes
See Also: Interview- Eddie Argos of Art Brut
Source: http://spectrumculture.com/2011/05/art-brut-brilliant-tragic.html
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