Eddie Argos is a poet. And he knows it.
“I just like the words,” Argos said by telephone from San Diego earlier this week, his thick, sometimes indecipherable British accent body slamming each consonant. “I try and be conversational in my music, because that’s what it is, right? A chat, a conversation with the kids?”
Argos, frontman for British buzz band Art Brut, which plays the Hi-Dive tonight, tells simple stories about love, family, forming a band and Israel-Palestine relations in his melodic post-punk music. The lyrics are so basic, the admissions so frank, that it’s almost like delving into a friend’s myspace.com page and discovering their other lives, obsessions, fears.
The fan favorite “Emily Kane” tells of a long-lost love, and it’s as heartbreakingly sweet as it is achingly funny.
‘”I was your boyfriend when we were 15/It’s the happiest that I’ve ever been/Even though we didn’t understand/How to do much more than just hold hands/There’s so much about you I miss/The clumsy way we used to kiss/I wish I convinced you, you’ve made a mistake/If memory serves, we’re still on a break/Other girls went and other girls came/I can’t get over my old flame/I’m still in love with Emily Kane.”
The song – which goes on to say, “Every girl I’ve seen since/Looks just like you when I squint” – captures everything that is Art Brut, a band named after French painter Jean Debuffet’s term for outsider art and “works executed by those immune to artistic culture in which imitation has no role.” And while Art Brut is hardly original, its direct and colloquial approach to rock ‘n’ roll is refreshing – and its live shows intoxicating.
“I put my personality into it,” Argos said. “I am a bit like that. There aren’t rock ‘n’ roll clichés. It’s just me trying to have a conversation. Everybody, they’ll ask me about my little brother and Emily Kane, and it’s nice and it makes it more personal. It’s fairly cathartic.”
Argos says at first he was “very self-conscious” but said that has not caused him to hold back. “The next album will be even more about me. It may be boring for the people. But I’ve always been into Jonathan Richman and bands like the Television Personalities. They were always big on talking about themselves.”
One of the band’s most infectious tracks is “My Little Brother,” in which Argos’ sibling discovers rock music. “There’s a noise in his head, and he’s out of control,” he half-sings in the dancey song. But it’s especially bizarre when his little brother comes to an Art Brut show, as in last month’s Insomniac’s Ball, an all-night music festival in London co-headlined by Art Brut and British Sea Power.
“And there he was, singing that song next to the stage at the show,” Argos said. “I was like, ‘Wow, there’s my little brother – on the guest list and the set list.”‘
Art Brut has been making music for nearly three years, and the members say they started writing songs within five minutes of forming – including the staggeringly funny “Formed a Band,” which includes the lyric “I wanna be the boy/The man that writes the song/That makes Israel and Palestine/Get along.”
After releasing a single on Rough Trade, the band’s “Brutlegs” got the attention of Fierce Panda, which released the debut full-length CD “Bang Bang Rock & Roll” in the U.K. last year.
The record comes out in the U.S. on Tuesday on Downtown Records. And Art Brut is enjoying being the new and hot band again, only in another country.
“It’s like starting again, only we sort of know what we’re doing this time and we’re much better players,” Argos said. “We were surprised that people here knew the words already when we first toured America, but it’s great. Other than the fact that the album’s not out yet in America, the shows are pretty much the same as they are in the U.K. People just get drunk and dumb, and since we’re drunk and dumb too, it all works out.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
Art Brut
ART ROCK|Hi-Dive, 7 S. Broadway; 7 tonight with Bird Monster and Constellations|$10-$12| hi-dive.com
