Art Brut

E-zine turned mag proper, Artrocker, launch their weekly printed mag this even’ with some art-rock bands. Imagine that.

Help She Can’t Swim kick straight from the fringe. It’s a posh suburban punka girl and some cutesy boys with big angular guitars tumbling down walls of askew guitars. With keys. File under British Pretty Girls Make Graves.

French Kicks are known for being another of those Poptones bands. They’ve got all the hipster Strokes-cloneage down, but their wet indie drizzles for the smokey days of yore. Songs start, fade, continue, dribble, fade out. The keys are clammy, the posturing painful and it’s all very much a brown’n’plaid smindie sexless affair.

How do you write a bad piece of journalism about an amateurish band? Art Brut; the new New York Dolls, they is not! If you think songs about being in a band is clever post-modernism, you’re wrong, wrong, wrong. “They’re brilliant,” my friend says, then pauses, “but they’re rubbish, that’s why I love ‘em!” Yeah, yeah, this is perfect in a time when shambolic = endearing, plus add some London-art-cool, get one journo on board and you’re suddenly ‘known’. Big things beckon. So it’s little wonder that they’ve had a hit single with ‘Formed a Band’, which, frankly, is a corker of a pop song!

But the problem, my problem, is Art Brut’re the band wot Ricky Gervais would front. They sound Matalan-kinda backward, with yokel vocals, dumb-grin posturing and the charisma of a turnip. Owch. S’all half-ideas trapped in their buck teeth. It’s not like we should all wanna see ourselves-only-better in entertainers, but c’mon, c’mon; is decadence that much of a dirty word? Or playing in time that hard to do? It’s not like all bands should be cool, or be so uncool they go full circle, but somewhere hidden behind their outta tune vocals should be something which could makes all these indie chancers queuing up for DeX-Factor, be special. So Art Brut, where is it?

Onto KaitO. Many moons ago, Kaito sounded like the test-tube babies of Bikini Kill, with a penchant for one-dimensional shouty punka-PUNKAAA! We’re talking way back. Like, three years ago. They were the almost perfect band for them girls dressed from hat-to-socks in Hello Kitty, sweet-necklaces and stomping gurt DM’s. Then a year or so ago they popped up at South By Southwest music conference as a totally different band.

And here is that Norwich band, another year on and they sound like a time-warping space craft with neon signs everywhere. They’re making angular disco for aliens. Space-rock taken to its dirtiest, most enthralling conclusion. They’re still a band with a high-pitched girlie shouting, but only now she’s screaming in a whole new world. Sensational.

Photo by Sonia Melot