Art Brut

Bang Bang Rock & Roll

Banana Recordings/Fierce Panda import

* * * *

Blender, 2005

In 2005, few things could be less “rock’n’roll” than playing rock’n’roll. Real estate speculation, starting a restaurant, modern art--all have stronger claims to the cutting edge. Yet rock groups infest the land,  fresh droves of them arriving each month bearing ever stupider names. “Formed A Band,” the opening track on the debut album by London’s Art Brut (not actually a stupid name, always a good sign), hilariously skewers the presumptuousness of taking the stage and demanding attention like it’s a birth right. Yet tangled up inside the self-mocking chorus--“look at us, we formed a band!”--there’s a primal yelp of idiot-glee. Almost despite itself, the song exalts the exuberance and cameraderie of ganging up with your mates to make noise.  

Dark droning punk with a twist of Wiry weirdness, “Formed” also recalls Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild”, in the sense that this is the group’s defining, all-too-perfect song, the immaculate mission statement Art Brut may have problems surpassing. Hitting the listener with your best shot straightaway is a strategic blunder in terms of album sequencing, but there’s plenty of further excitements within Bang Bang. “My Little Brother” is shouty ‘n’ jumpy New Wave with another funny lyric, about being embarrassed by a younger sibling who’s only “just discovered rock’n’roll” and throws spazzy shapes on the dancefloor.  On the title track, singer Eddie Argos demands “no more songs about sex and drugs and rock’n’roll/It’s boring,” while “Bad Weekend” mournfully confesses “popular/culture/no longer/applies to me.”  But Bang Bang isn’t wall-to-wall meta.  “Emily Kane” pines for a long-lost girlfriend (although Argos does imagine the song being such a hit that “kids on buses” will be “singing your name”) and “Rusted Guns of Milan” is an oblique account of erectile dysfunction, suffused with a hangdog seediness faintly reminiscent of Pulp.

On the downside, Argos’ half-spoken delivery means he sometimes seems to operate “outside” the music, in the mode of punk poets such as Jim Carroll and John Cooper Clarke, rather than in the thick of it, while the Art Brut sound occasionally verges on merely mundane liveliness.  At their slightest, Art Brut come over like indie-rock’s equivalent to The Darkness (in “Good Weekend” Argos even eggs on Chris Chinchilla’s solo with a “go guitar!,” just like Justin Hawkins on “I Believe in a Thing Called Love”).  But at their most thrilling, Art Brut fuse the spiky cool of Elastica with the witty self-consciousness of an LCD Soundsystem. They mean it, sort of, maaaaan. 

“Art Brut, we’ve only just started,” Argos declares on “Formed.” For once, this isn’t just an empty promise. 

                                                                                               
 

GREIL MARCUS

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

Melody Maker, June 15th 1989

by Simon Reynolds

If you sometimes wonder if we at MM read too much into rock music, then your minds will BOGGLE at what Greil Marcus brings to bear on his subject matter. Starting with the question, “what is the source of the ‘irreducible power’ of the Sex Pistols’ music?” he sweeps the reader along on a breakneck, century-spanning odyssey that takes in Dada, the Situationists, the Paris Commune of 1870, Saint-Just, and Mediaeval mystics like The Brethren Of The Free Spirit and the Gnostics.

Marcus sees Johnny Rotten as the latest incarnation of a cultural archetype: “the negationist” who rejects utterly his parent culture, makes impossible demands on life, and rejuvenates a moribund Art by exhibiting absolute contempt towards it. Art is the enemy, because it upholds the border between dreams and everyday life: it siphons off utopian idealism and petrifies it in objects, which themselves turn peopleinto objects, passive consumers. Punk, Dada, the Paris uprisings of May ’68, were subversive because they exploded the gulf between art and lived experience.

Rather than tracing the genealogy of ideas, Marcus convenes a “conversation’ between figures, separated by decades, who have mostly never heard of each other. For Marcus, “serendipity is where you find it”: his special delight is in the metaphors that recur uncannily across the eras. He shows particular Pistols’ lyrics to be either borrowings or unaccountable echoes of earlier anarchist/nihilist catchphrases: “Cheap holiday in other people’s misery” originates in a Lettrist rant against tourism (capitalism’s latest means of accommodating and controlling people’s dreams). “I am an Antichrist”, he links with the celebrated 1950 incident where a group of neo-Dada pranksters entered Notre Dame during Easter Mass and, dressed as monks, delivered a sermon on the Death Of God to 10,000 strong congregation.

Another goodie is the fact that Nik Cohn, the first writer to celebrate pop as a GLORIOUS BURST OF INCOHERENT NOISE (“Awopbopaloobop”), turns out to be the son of Norman Cohn, historian of the apocalyptic anarcho-cults of the Middle Ages (The Pursuit Of The Millenium). And that Little Richard’s histrionic gibberish descends, via gospel, from the Gnostic incantations of the second century.

The Pistols’ rock wasn’t protest, didn’t present the “proper authorities” with a programme of demands: it was pure demand, blank and intransitive—”Don’t know what I want/But I know how to get it.” Rotten’s singing (like the sound poetry of Dada and Lettrism, or the Gnostics speaking-in-tongues) “dissolved the ideologies of left and right into glossolalia”: issued a “statement” that could be “understood but never explained”.

A key source for Marcus is Henri Lefebvre, Marxist ally of the Situationists, and his “Theory Of Moments”: the tiny epiphanies that explode through the “poverty of everyday life,” glimpses of a “totality” that’s been lost in the fragmentation of late 20th century capitalist life.

The Situationists caught, in the “self-destructive” nature of avant-garde poetry, glimpses of this lost utopia. Their project was to ‘realise poetry.” “The sort of moments eveyone once passed through without consciousness… now everyone would consciously create… ” Theirs was the impossible dream of living a life of unremitting bliss.

Of course, the idea vaporises the minute you think about it: it isn’t possible to be a social or even a humanbeing, and live at a perpetual peak of word-less ecstasy.

Obviously, I’m a partisan of Marcus’ inflationary cause but, as far as I can see, Lipstick Traces (Secker and Warburg, £14.95) rarely oversteps the mark or taxes your credulity: punk did contain all these ancient and limitless longings, it did demand the world and, for a few vinyl moments, it did seem to have it (even if the world never knew).

Above all, Lipstick Traces exemplifies Marcus’ brilliance at bringing music to life: in punk’s case, conveying the sense of people seizing the moment. He makes me want to listen to records I’ve disregarded for years. If the book has a fault, it’s that the tone is elegiac, the implication being that punk still towers over all that came after it, and remains a reproach to an impoverished present.

In fact, lust for chaos and hungerfor the impossible, raves on in the underground rock of the moment. What is missing is a sense of altercation with the times.

riot beats

VARIOUS ARTISTS

ROUGH AND FAST

(Riot Beats) 
The Wire, 1995?

by Simon Reynolds

All my anxieties about jungle's upwardly-mobile drift

towards dubious concepts like 'musicality' and 'maturity'

seem to be on the verge of becoming horrendous reality.

You've got artists utilising 'real' musicians, punters who

(ap)praise tracks in terms of how 'clean' their production

is, and a burgeoning mutual admiration pact between the Mo'

Wax posse and the drum & bass intelligentsia. All the new

styles in what must now be termed post-jungle are ultra-

smooth and mellifluously mellow--from hardstep, with its

fussy hi-hat shuffle-beats and tastefully restrained soul-diva

passion, to the fusion-tinged serenity and long sustained

synth-tones of the LTJ Bukem school.  Don't get me wrong,

these developments are still generating astonishing music.

But sometimes you've got to wonder: whither jungle's mania,

madness, ruffness?

For that, you might look to the UK's 'happy hardcore'

scene, which has back-lashed to '92 in order to follow a

different path than that taken by drum & bass, i.e. fixating

on staccato synth-stabs, rush-activating piano riffs, helium-

shrill vocals and stomping 4/4 beats. Or you might check out

Germany's small but fervent breakbeat scene, as represented

on Rough and Fast.  Based around a handful of labels,

Germanic jungle has more of an explicitly political edge than

its British cousin.  Key figure Alec Empire of agit-tekno

combo Atari Teenage Riot released a jungle track called "Hunt

Down the Nazis" (appropriate given that jungle is all about

musical miscegenation and post-colonial cultural hybridity).

Doubtless by necessity, German jungle is less polished

and fluent than current UK fare, but in a way that only adds

to its raw appeal--there's a fierce inflexibility, an un-

swinging rigour, to the drum programming that's curiously

invigorating at a time when so much UK drum & bass verges on

fuzak-with-breakbeats.  Much of this comp harks back to

jungle's under-rated 'dark' phase of early 1993, when

hardcore producers were first messin' with fucked up rhythms

but the music still retained some relation to techno (Joey Beltram/Belgian brutalism style as opposed to trance).

And so DJ Moonraker's "Lion King" and Space Cube's "Dark

Dive" both let rip bass-blast synth-riffs, redolent of the

Frankfurt-based PCP label's brand of stormtrooper tekno,

amidst the jittery, shimmery breaks, while Roland 303

aciiied-squiggles are woven into the hyper-syncopated bustle

of Sonic Subjunkies' "Djungelstadt" and Dr Echo & DJ

Reverend's "Fine Style".  And on Doc Tom's "Moskito" there's

a terrific ear-searing synth-noise that, yup, sounds like a

squadron of mosquitos dive-bombing upon your flesh.

As with most non-Anglophone appropriations of Brit-pop

there's something slightly wrong-sounding about the results:

just check those names--Doc Tom, Sonic Subjunkies, Mental

Bombin, DJ Reverend. But the best tracks here--the

itchy'n'scratchy insectoid scrabble of Biobreaks' "May The

Funk Be With You", the prehensile rhythmic intricacies and

gamelan-textured percussion-rolls of Da Captains of Phuture's

"Legendary Flight"--suggest not just that the Krauts may soon

catch but with their UK forebears, but that jungle's next and

most interesting phase will involve regional hybrids across

the globe: G-funk junglism, Miami Bass'n'drum, Latin-

breakbeat, Scandinavian new complexity 'ardkore....