art brut - bang bang rock and roll
i'm a sucker for solid indie brit-pop albums. belle & sebastian shaped my current musical tastes. don't even get me started on the libertines. i heard art brut for the first time today both at home & work & in my headphones & man, it's some libertines-level shit.

seriously, everyone & their mother's wrote about eddie argos' i wanna be the boy/the man that writes the song/that makes israel and palestine/get along. classic. and the shouting of i've seen her naked. twice! on good weekend is quite clap-worthy.

anyway, check it out. britain rules!

art brut

so last night was everybody's favorite indie darlings-of-the-moment, wolf parade, at bowery. thanks to my preview of their two new york shows in last week's new york press:

wolf parade oct 24-25
OH MY GOD THE GREATEST ROCK BAND IN THE UNIVERSE HAS COME TO PLANET EARTH TO SAVE US! HOLY MONTREAL, BATMAN! We’re pretty sure that at last count that was the headline across every music publication on the planet. So, if you’re one of those people who makes it a point to hate bands after they become part-band/most-hype, you’d better move on and start getting into Arctic Monkeys. If you’re not, Wolf Parade’s got the best thing going right now. With their recently-released Apologies to the Queen Mary, they’ve put out an album that, in 2005, has been eclipsed by only one album (according to indie gurus Pitchfork)—Kanye West’s Late Registration. Full of jagged keyboards, disjointed hooks, and scratchy lyrics—blissfully blasphemous lyrics—the Parade’s album smashes through ten songs and two ballads without devolving into the pop crap you’d expect these days from Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock (who introduced the band to Sub Pop and produced part of the album.)

...and the loving sub pop employee with access to the comp list, i was there. for me, it was my first non-cmj show with them & it was quite possibly the best show i've seen in years...but i do have a spotty memory & constantly-evolving musical tastes, so my claim probably wouldn't withstand any rigorous testing.

the best way to describe them is that their live show features performances of most of their gems at a level that is both 5x as fast & 10x as intense without a drop in quality (save for the way some of the trademark two part harmonies were washed away in the mix).

as for the setlist, they played pretty much everything off of Apologies... except for "Grounds for Divorce."...and they played three new songs and an old one to thwart the human setlist in the front row who kept yelling out song titles. yes. we know you can remember song titles. the fifth "is-he-or-is-he-not a member" member of the band jokingly snapped at him, "we have a very rigid setlist!" we all chuckled heartily at that one. anyway, the new songs are new/solid. punch us on the face with a new album soon, guys. pretend you're mark e. smith.

side highlight of the evening:
the sub pop employee who yelled out "shit in my pussy" at the band.