More Complicated Than It Would Appear

The Idolator poll is out, and you can see my comments here. I want to highlight something from it, though, because it concerns a (in my view) criminally overlooked album damned with faint praise: Art Brut's It's a Bit Complicated. Not sure how well this comes across below, but I think there's a real overarching story to the album that tracks the process of maturity: debauched denial through a moment of clarity and into acceptance. I'll paste it in below.

*****

So instead, let's just talk about Art Brut's It's a Bit Complicated, the year's most misunderstood album. Everyone seemed to either ignore it or dismiss it as more of the same Art Brut we saw on Bang Bang Rock and Roll. But it wasn't; after all, if it was, more people probably would have liked it. It's the curse of novelty. Just as I get the feeling people listen to Electric 6 and, no matter how much they like it, think something along the lines of "Well, this can't possibly be a good album," so did people see that Art Brut released a sophomore album and assumed that, since Art Brut is jokey and not mysterious, they are essentially a one-hit wonder. But lots of great albums are novelty albums--most of the White Stripes albums are, as are the Arcade Fire, everything Timbaland's ever produced, and that godawful Field album, to say nothing of Bjork. Novelty is a prerequisite of pop, not a mitigator of its greatness.

Since artistic worth is here being tied to an ability to change, though, let us be clear: Complicated is doing a very different thing than Bang Bang was. Specifically, where Art Brut's debut was about the thrills and terrors of adolescence, this album is about the dissolute early 20s. Now. One of the great things pop music has done, as far as I can tell, is to depict the ecstatic possibilities of adolescence in such an accurate and potent way as to wholly legitimate them--to make them undeniably real in the common understanding. This obviously does not come close to encompassing the whole of human experience, but instead of fleshing out those other avenues with the same level of verisimilitude, musicians have tended to respond to the situation by trying to express opposite extremes--melodramatic sadness, romantic need, righteous anger--and these have far less tether to life as it is lived. Adolescence is the one time in life when you can get away with extreme emotions, and at any other age, such theatricality is hard to maintain, and so those extreme emotions proposed as counterweights go too far, flying off the table of recognizable experience. With the kind of experiences Eddie Argos is discussing here, they tend to get filtered through what we'll call "Libertine-ism," or the depiction of mere brokeness as a romantic squalor enjoyable in and of itself. The streets are dirty! Isn't my life interesting! But for Argos, as for the vast majority of people, being broke is not bohemian but a hassle, a complicating condition that makes basic tasks considerably harder. It's something to escape, not celebrate, and when you're within it, it's something that feels so crushing you can only joke about it.

The key song here is "I Will Survive." Where a Libertinesy song might evoke destruction and drugs and oh the pain of it all, the scene Eddie Argos paints will be familiar to anyone who tried to make it as a creative person in their post-college years: "I can get by without electricity / so you don't have to lend me money...if you're cold and hungry, put on a coat / our bread is so stale you can't tell if it's toast." It's an almost embarrassingly accurate portrait of what that sort of living situation actually resembled, framed (crucially) as justifications given to an outsider who is repulsed by it all. Where most songs focus on the false hope that comes at the beginning of such a living situation, Argos gives the slightly more mature perspective of someone who's been doing it for a few years and still seeing the same squalor. A sense of confusion begins to set in as you continue to live in filth while failing to actually accomplish anything. You want to succeed--you want to move out of this horrible apartment--but you can't, and so you turn to substance abuse not as a different way of living but as a way to escape your failure. Argos nails it: "I know what it looks like / and I can tell you're not impressed / I don't know what I'm doing / but it's feeling like success...Life is what you make it / and I've made mine a mess." The song reaches a climax, with Argos shouting, "I'm young and nothing can harm me / I sold all my records to pay for a party / I'm still drunk, but that's all right / I've been staying out every night...I'm ignoring my grown-up problems / as I've got no idea how to solve them!" And in this moment of drunken bafflement and panic, the backup vocals come in, like reassuring voices in the back of your head, and they coo: I will survive. It's possibly the most potent musical moment of the year, a moment of clarity that negates the denial of the first half of the record and sets the course to a comedown, a reconsideration, and a reorganization in the second. The casual dismissal of love in "People in Love" (they "lie around and get fat," Argos says, so a breakup is necessary because "I didn't want us to end up like that") becomes, as we'll see below, something very different.

So for Argos, the pleasure of this dissolute period is not the aesthetic enjoyment of squalor, but the kind of small pleasures that, again, constitute life as it is lived for most people, and here it comes from two specific things: music and love. The music is on songs like "Pump Up the Volume," "Direct Hit," and "Nag Nag Nag Nag," and its pleasures are certainly potent. But again, these are small pleasures. Instead of "Good Weekend"'s amazed exclamation of "I've seen her naked, twice! I've seen her naked, twice!" we have "Blame it on the Train." It's one of the sweetest songs I've ever heard, and thinking about it now, in bed, late at night, with the person I love elsewhere, it hits just as hard as any of Bang Bang's giddy juvenilia. Eddie is trying to get someone to stay in bed with him, not to have sex, but just to be warm and close under the covers. They've been there awhile already, but he wants more time--he can never get enough time--whereas the other person is trying to get them out of the house to meet some friends. But they can wait, Eddie says, and we can be late, if we want to be; we can tell our friends that the train was late, and we can spend that time instead next to each other. Maybe this is particularly touching to me because the person I love does this, too, holds me tight when I try and get up and whines a little but only because she wants more warmth, more time as close to me as possible. So if, when the bridge hits and Eddie sings "Stay / with me / stay here / stay here with me," it doesn't hit home...well, you don't know what you're missing. But I know what I'm missing, all too well, and that's why I'm up at 3 in the morning. There's no warmth next to me, nothing resting on my shoulder as I drift off to sleep, just a cold window and a beating in my chest.

Labels: art brut, best-of, idolator

posted by Mike B. @ 3:50 PM