Art Brut - Alcoholics Unanimous

(Muso's Guide, March 27, 2009)

Single review

Sometimes it takes a real event to blow the socks off the music world.

In 2005, Art Brut released their début record Bang, Bang, Rock & Roll and UK music fans knew true happiness thanks to an Anglo-Germanic ethos of rocking and, indeed, rolling. It was a Real Event, holding back no capital letters, and at the centre of the artrock hurricane, the angles, the musical jags and melodious mayhem was Eddie Argos.

An extreme-eyebrowed, self-effacing savant with a nice line in dynamic onstage zaniness, making use of props like vacuum cleaners. His frankly personal lyrics cover everything from DC Comics to impotence, but always with a wry glance and a cock of those eyebrows.

Long-awaited and much fêted thanks to a net leak, the third album Art Brut vs. Satan is continuing in the same vein, and guide single ‘Alcoholics Unanimous’ is a stunner; Argos’ trademark vocal cuts through the jaggedly musical melée with confidence. His style - of more speaking than singing - very much complements the Art Brut sound, and creates in him an off-kilter but utterly convincing frontman.

Here he’s telling the traveller’s tale of the drunken night out that hasn’t gone so well. All the usual ingredients are here - perfectly formed guitars, hewn directly from solid ‘cool’, as well as Argos’ inimitable lyrics: “There’s so many people I might have upset,” he explains. “I apologise to them all with the same group text.”

The video is set up as an Art Brut documentary - with the title Drunk: A Documentary - all serious straight shots of band members looking concerned. Argos stumbles blithely into an ‘Alcoholics Unanimous’ meeting and wreaks having, hollering “Bring me tea! Bring me coffee!” as the other attendees tell him he isn’t hiding his hungover state very well.

In truth, it’s what the music world’s been waiting for, and heralds the forthcoming album as staunchly and proudly as any fan could have hoped.

It’s unanimous.