All You Can Art Dubuffet

The second consecutive review where I've referenced Stewart Lee.  Perhaps I secretly want to be a comedy reviewer.

ART BRUT/ CASSELS/ HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN & UNCLE PEANUT, Crosstown, Bully, 18/2/19

Here Are The Young Men & Uncle Peanut are very upset with an old review in this very periodical, and have written the song “The Day The Hipsters Stole Our Look”, to prove that they look stupid on their own merits.  In fact, they don’t really look like hipsters, they look like lorry drivers suffering PTSD from a particularly harrowing ghost train.  Sour grapes aside, they’re great fun, each track a garish punk-hop rant rarely breaching two minutes.  Fans of Oxford’s Restructure will find plenty to enjoy, especially in their tale of brash kids who think they’re pop stars cluttering up a perfectly good pub.  Far more amusing than a band with such an infuriating name has any right to be.

Fun not being something Cassels are supposed to be.  They’re all math-grunge settings of 5000 word essays on neoliberalism and voting habits in the Cotswolds, aren’t they?  Well, yes, but tonight, they find time for a few jokes and a surreal discussion on relative drum popularity (snare for the square, rack tom for the maverick).  Also, angular as the songs might be, they no longer seem to be played by the sort of hyperactively awkward kids who get holes in their blazer elbows before the first week of term is out, but by a couple of riff-sucking rock heavies with a taste for both Sabbath and Shellac.  This feels like a new version of Cassels.  We really like them both.

“Popular culture no longer applies to me”, intones Eddie Argos toward the end of Art Brut’s fascinating set, a return to touring after 7 years, and nearly twice that since they were famous.  The question is, what does someone clearly in love with the magic of pop do when then they lose track of it entirely, and what does an absurdist do when our media landscape is more absurd than any fantasy.  The answer is, just admit it, play everything twice as loud and for twice as long and see what happens.

With their spoken and barked narratives and chugging, minimal rock, Art Brut are The Nightingales without the Beefheart abstraction, The Blue Aeroplanes without the well-thumbed paperbacks, Ten Benson without the Wire write-ups, and a comedy band without any jokes.  In fact, the best parts of this set are two long wayward monologues that are purest Stewart Lee (“You think I’m improvising this, but you can buy a CD of me saying the whole thing...even that bit, about the CD”).  Let’s be honest, a lot of the songs are pretty crap, but the experience as a whole is irrepressibly gleeful, and, at the end of the last song, as we all raise our hands as one to a bit nicked from “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”, suddenly it’s all oddly moving.  How did that happen?  Wasn’t this all a joke?  Does it matter that Argos and Emily Kane are now Facebook friends?  When did the hipsters steal out look?  Where the hell did all those years go so quickly?