By Sean Moeller

Beer and rock and roll. Luxuries you say? Hardly, argues Art Brut lead singer Eddie Argos. Beer and rock and roll are absolute necessities, on the same level as shelter, debit cards and toothpicks after a steak dinner. Being in a band, the perfect conjoining of the two very different entities, is also not seen as a privilege by Argos—the brazen, tuneless id-feeder. It’s a right and one that he embraces with a hurtful grip. He’s the UK, non-migrant worker version of Lennie from Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” squeezing the shit out of the very sweetness of a pure form, making it a more hedonistic activity than it already is.

Argos and the rest of his London-based band enjoy the narcissism of the activity and prefer to sing about never-ending crushes on girls, the desire to live elsewhere, music they hate, things that make them want to rock out (even MORE!), the actual act of being in a rock and roll band and scoffing at a little brother who just recently discovered angst-ridden b-sides and bootlegs—the real music. It’s as if high school has gained another voice to speak for it.

“I’d say the new songs are less adolescent than the old ones, but I don’t really think that the things I sing about are that adolescent,” Argos said in a phone interview. “I think everyone worries about girls and the way they act around girls. I’m still nervous around girls and I worry about what I’m going to say. I don’t think those are trivial concerns.”

“Formed A Band,” the song that took a battering ram to the European charts last fall, is all about lagging a tongue and bragging proudly about the cool factor one earns when they have a microphone or guitar in their hands. It’s an immediate transformation from zero to DeNiro. Argos sings, “Formed a band/We formed a band/Look at us/We formed a band…And yes/This is my singing voice/It’s not irony/It’s not rock and roll/We’re just talking to the kids” and the pride just glistens off of every word, a baboon pounding against his naked chest.

Argos started his first group at 15, influenced by his young mother’s taste in music and his attraction to Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine.

“It’s not very cool to say that, but it should be,” Argos said of loving Carter.

His voice might not be ironic, but he insists that much of what he sings about is, stretching the bounds of earnestness and hyperbole, slaking his appetite for theatrics and self-grandiosity that you get when Har Har Superstar struts around on stages, copping a hard-ass demeanor and saying, “Buy my fucking records.”

So far, Art Brut have had no problem leading the horses to water and getting them to drink. It’s debut “Bang Bang Rock and Roll”—already a chart-breaker in the UK—hasn’t even been released here in the U.S. (out June 13 on Downtown Records, home of the totally rad Gnarls Barkley—or as their press photos suggest, Wayne and Garth—and Josh Homme’s Eagles of Death Metal) and the band’s playing nothing but sold out shows across the country this month. They’ve even already smitten the youth of Lawrence, Kansas and Chapel Hill, N.C., not an easy thing to do.

“It’s better than I ever thought it would be. It’s all fucking mad,” said Argos, who was battling through a sniffling bout of hay fever that had prevented him from drinking for an absurdly long span of two days. “It’s the power of the Internet. How do you live up to it? We’ll probably fuck it up. We’ll find a way.”

www.artbrut.org.uk