Art Brut

Photo: Joe Dilworth

"Look at us, we formed a band!" Art Brut's 2004 debut single may be the most self-referential since Green's "Gotta Get a Record Out" from 20 years ago. When he's not chanting the title of "Formed a Band," frontman Eddie Argos comments on his Bournemouth accent and outsize ambitions ("We'll be the band that writes the song / That makes Israel and Palestine get along"). The group even has an appropriately DIY moniker, lifting painter Jean Dubuffet's term for "works by those unharmed by artistic culture."

That very connection is a clue that Art Brut's members aren't quite the naïfs they appear to be; even "Formed a Band" is backed by interlocking guitars a touch too adept for true neophytes. This is a very good thing: With loud-and-clear production by John Fortis and Howard Gray, their new full-length, Bang Bang Rock & Roll (Fierce Panda; U.K.), is fresh and forceful, but surprisingly disciplined. Its most evident debts are to two of rock's great (not so) primitives: Jonathan Richman (as on the boyish, love-struck "Emily Kane") and Mark E. Smith ("Bad Weekend," with Argos sourly muttering, "Popular culture no longer applies to me").

In the U.K., the group's fans have already formed numbered "franchise" bands: Art Brut 305, and so forth. That may sound like a peculiarly literal-minded kind of bandwagon-jumping, but if the original article displays as much enthusiasm on its first U.S. tour as on disc, it could happen here as well.—Franklin Bruno