Breaking Artist: Art Brut Storm Back With Their Second Disc

WHO: Exuberant English quartet with a lean, crude riff-rock sound and a brilliantly funny frontman, Eddie Argos, who specializes in childlike, half-spoken vocals about erectile dysfunction and other romantic misadventures. After declining to attend university -- he deliberately flunked his admissions exams, choosing to write his essay about the A-Team Argos formed Art Brut in 2002. After an endearingly funny 2005 debut and a series of killer live gigs on both sides of the Atlantic, Art Brut amped up their sound for their great new album, It's a Bit Complicated.

HEAR IT NOW: Complicated gets huge mileage out of a simple sound: Exuberant, garage-y banging overlayed with half-spoken jokes and narratives, with Argos picking through the ashtray of his brain and offering himself as the punchline -- as on "Jealous Guy," where he tries to "accidentally" wake his sleeping girl to get laid. Check out that unique sound on Art Brut's MySpace page.

WATCH IT: Dig the video for Complicated's banging new single, "Direct Hit."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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