We’ve been undergoing a minor Brutaissance lately, with the endearing London post-punk group Art Brut rolling out two career-spanning retrospective releases: the limited-edition double LP A Record Collection, Reduced to a Mixtape and the five-CD boxset And Yes, This Is My Singing Voice!—both releases named after memorable lyrics from their first two albums. And while the band fronted by talk-singer Eddie Argos hasn’t released a new album since 2018, there are plenty of exciting new recordings housed within these collections—including a new acoustic take on the sunny Bang Bang Rock & Roll cut “Moving to LA,” which is among a handful of “Brutlegs” included on the latter release.
“Chris Chinchilla, our first guitarist, was really good at getting things done—a very organized go-getter,” Argos recalls of how these Brutleg recordings came to be. “He had this idea that we would regularly self-release our songs as ‘Brutlegs’; the plan was that you could download them for free online, or buy them burnt onto CD-Rs from our gigs for £1.50. Our first Brutleg (and our first-ever recordings as a band) contained ‘Formed a Band’ and ‘Modern Art,’ and they accidentally ended up being our first two singles, those actual recordings we made for the CD-R. So we decided to be a bit more cautious with our second Brutleg, as if everything we recorded accidentally became a single we'd end up with nothing to put on an album. That’s why we recorded ‘Moving to LA’ acoustically: so it could be just a special alternate version of the song, and if it did also accidentally become a single, we'd be able to record a different full-band version for the album. It didn’t end up accidentally becoming a single, so we were fine.”
Regarding this second boxset, arriving tomorrow, Argos goes on to note that it’s the first of two such releases to arrive this year, the latter of which will spotlight their 2011 album Brilliant! Tragic! and its 2018 follow-up Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out! “Going through the archives, it was great to hear so many different versions of the songs. I was tempted to make a CD that was just 15 different versions of ‘Rusted Guns of Milan,’ all with different lyrics. I like that we’ve always had a sensitive, lo-fi side, too, and with the B-sides and home recordings on the boxset that comes through really well. I also feel [that] the more you sing a song in the studio, the less authenticity it has, and on some of the early versions of songs in the boxset you can almost hear my brain whirring as I write the words.”
Check out the Brutleg version of “Moving to LA” below, and purchase And Yes, This Is My Singing Voice! here.
