Pitchfork

Photo by Michael Alan Goldberg

It takes no stretch of the imagination to believe that Art Brut frontman Eddie Argos might be of the slightly nerdy persuasion; just listen to an Art Brut record and you'll probably come up with the same conclusion. But there's a lot of different kinds of nerds out there, and until now, we had Eddie pegged as strictly one of our own: a rock'n'roll geek of great esteem.

As it turns out, Mr. Argos also dabbles in another one of the geeky arts, that of the comic book. In fact, Eddie's so into them, he's taken on a regular column on the matter called "Pow! To the People!" for the St. Louis-based entertainment site PLAYBACK:stl.

Eddie's written four such columns for PLAYBACK thus far (which you can read by clicking here), with ruminations on Batman, his recent exploration into the world of independent comics, and how very much he hates Mark Millar's Wanted. His first column closes with the extremely Art Brut-ish line, "In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably admit that I was once a bullied, sex-obsessed fifteen-year-old that maintained revenge fantasies too."

On the music front, Eddie's got even more culture jams coming at you, in the form of two new side projects. The first is called Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now. As previously noted in Forkcast, the group is hard at work penning answer songs to hits from throughout pop history. According to a blog post on the matter, "Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now are correcting the mistakes of pop songs past. So far they have defended the belittled blue collar worker from Kanye West's 'Gold Digger', told Gerry and the Pacemakers that in fact it is okay to walk alone, dumped the manipulative Martha Reeves on behalf of poor Jimmy Mack and taken the misguided instructions of a 17th century ballad to its logical conclusion. THEY ARE FIXING THE CHARTS." The French Resistance album is apparently being recorded in Joshua Tree, California and can be expected early next year.

The second is Glam Chops, an over-the-top glam band that sounds like an even jokier version of Art Brut. Sample song title: "Don't Be Glum, Be Glam". They have a few dates lined up for the fall.

Eddie will also lay down his dog-eared copy of The Watchmen and hit the road with Art Brut at a handful of European dates over the next few months. According to a blog post from Eddie in early August, Art Brut are busy working on their third album, with such prospective song titles as "Art Brut Versus Satan", "Moved to L.A", "Alcoholics Unanimous", and "Summer Job" (Eddie adds: "Although I'm probably going to change the name of 'Summer Job'  to the name of a song that exists already and if not that I'll probably just name it after some sort of weekend.")



Art Brut:

09-06 St. Gallen, Switzerland - Club Gare de Lion
09-20 Isla Cristina, Spain - South Pop Festival
10-20 Berlin, Germany - Great Escape Festival
11-08 Bremen, Germany - Campus Rockt Festival
12-06 Hamburg, Germany - Winter Festival

Glam Chops:

10-09 Cardiff, Wales - Loose Club @ UWIC
10-10 Bath, England - Purr @ Moles
10-11 London, England - Guided Missle
11-15 TBA, Wales - TBA
12-13 London, England - Guided Missle Xmas Party