Flashion Forward with UI as we gaze at the strange and colorful aesthetic scape fashion and music create when they collide. That’s right: let’s frolic about the closets of our fanciest, freshest interviewees and explore the zany manners in which artistes express themselves–and find out if their musical and sartorial styles sing in harmony or clash discordantly.
The auspiciously named Art Brut (in honor of Jean Dubuffet and outsider artists everywhere) sets itself up immediately as an aggressively outré band–Frank Black was a fan from day one. Dubbed “crudely hooky” and simultaneously “one-shot art-punk” one thing’s clear: for this band, originality is probably as important as execution, though most (even non-art-punk fans) find their “crashing percussion, tube-driven guitar ferocity, and fat bass lines “devasting(ly) addictive.”
At first sound, Art Brut seems like the kind of band that would insist on living in a sprawling, rat-infested loft in Bushwick, Brookyn, subsisting on tofu, sprouts, minced garlic and Schlitz while wearing nothing but third-hand dumpster/salvation army finds. But they actually resemble math nerds who ran into a vat of manic panic wielded by a stylist from TLC who totally hooked them up with her interpretation of what the cool kids are wearing these days. Meta!
Somehow, the mustaches, Bon Jovi ‘dos and bad scarves just make them seem more…legitimate. Like, they’re so into their art-punk lifestyle they don’t have time to page through Paste and figure out that knee-length blazers are totally 2002.
Below, check out their peripatetic approach to the road, touring and travel–and why London’s just a stopover on a longer journey into the night.
TOPICS: Flashion Forward, Kathleen Willcox