Art Brut - 'It's A Bit Complicated' (Mute) Released 25/06/07

With their 2004 debut, ‘Bang Bang Rock & Roll’, Art Brut managed to breathe fresh life into an increasingly stagnant pool of overly-serious guitar bands. Raucous and ragged, it felt necessary at a time when self-righteousness seemed to have taken hold of the music community. Moreover, in Eddie Argos - a front man whose sing-speak style falls somewhere between Jonathan Richman and Phil Daniels – the band contained a rapier wit whose anecdotal paeans to sexual naiveté and adolescent fumbling provided a much needed antithesis to the current trend of pretentiousness.

Now, with success that extends Stateside and beyond, you’d forgive Art Brut for fostering some of the same pretensions that they readily mocked first time around. Fortunately, however, despite the claims of its title, ‘It’s A Bit Complicated’ demonstrates that the band haven’t lost any of the raw immediacy that made them so intriguing in the first place. A large part of ‘Bang Bang’s appeal lie in the humour generated by Argos’s vivid perceptions and, auspiciously, his adolescent observations resonate just as loudly here. Take opener ‘Pump Up The Volume’ for instance, where, in the midst of an awkward fumble, he turns to his partner to muse “is it right or wrong, to break from your kiss to turn up a pop song?” The delivery is curt, the fuzz guitars similarly clipped.

This music theme resonates louder on ‘Sound Of Summer’, where Argos recalls a relationship built around the exchanging of mix-tapes: “Tapes that are full of the things we can’t say/ to each other during the day”. He deliberately gropes for the words of course, but, much like ‘Emily Kane’ on the band’s debut, it works to become and incredibly astute examination of young love (or lust) at play. Sonically, the sound is much thicker than on the band’s debut, and, flanked by new guitarist Jasper Future, they edge close to Weezer territory on the rolling leads and choppy power chords of ‘I Will Survive’. Elsewhere, things are beefed up further as the tweeting guitar lines of ‘Jealous Guy’ evoke images of the Libertines.

With layered guitars, multi-tracked harmonies and even horn sections, the formula for Art Brut’s second release might seem a bit more complicated than their first, but, with an irrepressible wit and forthright attitude, their appeal remains unerringly straightforward.