How's That Phrased?

originally published October 24, 2007

Rappers, economically speaking, in the linguistic sense, have it easy. For every four drawn-out, muttered/ mumbled lines of blather the average rock musicians gets in per verse, rappers get in, I dunno, eight or 16. If we're talking strictly about efficiency of space, emcees simply cover more ground in less time and thereby have more opportunities to stick verbiage into whatever musical crevices they see fit. Enter The Hold Steady and Art Brut, two bands that have earned the rep for "literate" songs, or that at least create noticeable lyrics with noticeable deliveries. While no one could ever confuse vocalists Craig Finn or Eddie Argos, respectively, with, say, Lil Wayne, the pair parlay their lacking (or disinterest?) in the melody department into two idiosyncratic styles of talk-singing. And as opposed to your typical grunge-weaned marbles-in-mouth waste-kid, Finn and Argos cleanly execute their verbal deliveries with an archer's accuracy, albeit in very different ways.

While the members of The Hold Steady lay claim, like so many before them, to Brooklyn as their current base of operations, their heart was molded and their spirit crushed and rebuilt in Minneapolis. Borne of the ashes of the band Lifter Puller, The Hold Steady has played the indie rock game long enough to have ditched the irritating phantom of pretense and is all the better for it. The quintet produces alarmingly commercial-sounding pop-rock that is unapologetically un-metropolitan; it can really only be described as bar-rock. We're talking Springsteen organ riffs, windmill guitars and other cheap tricks.

Craig Finn recontextualizes the entire affair. Years of migration from bar to bar, city to city, and scene to scene has left him well versed in the dialect of tragic party people, with a keen eye for sad ironies and pop culture jokes. Riffing on Adam & Eve ("I heard they were naked when they got busted") or wiseass hoodrats ("She said you remind me of Rod Stewart when he was young / You're positive that you're sexy and all the punks think you're dumb") is nothing out of the ordinary for him, but it's the shameful moments of drug-and-drink-fueled excess that Finn really nails.

Eddie Argos' level of self-awareness is… debatable. The first thing I thought of when I heard his band Art Brut's post-Britpop (can we say post-Britpop yet?) was of Blur's day-in-the-life monologue "Park Life," off the album of the same name. If The Hold Steady is world-weary, Argos is boisterous and puckish, almost to a fault, and inexorably British. The members' childlike, punky enthusiasm, whether derived from a "New Girlfriend" or because they "Formed a Band," is infectious, and their anyone-can-start-a-band fist-pumping wipes away self-consciousness from the audience, resulting in a truly great live experience.

It's the final lines that Argos gets in that kill me. After declaring his designs on the top of the Billboard charts (effectively useless following Radiohead's declaration of independence, but that's another article), he crows: "Dye your hair black and never look back! My past is my business!" Last words like that hint at a winking knowingness that affords Art Brut a shadow of mystery and grants its near-bubblegum pop some depth.

Jeff Tobias

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column.