TV Personalities, Half Man Half Biscuit, Pooh Sticks—the U.K. has long been turning out self-reflexive smart arses who manage to have it both ways, undermining the lovingly constructed fantasies of pop culture while making great music. Despite the deeply British nature of Art Brut's meta-ironic concerns—the punch line to most of its jokes relate to singer Eddie Argos's demented desire to be on Top of the Pops—Vancouver showed up for the band's first performance here with the kind of gusto you'd otherwise expect at Hammersmith Odeon, not Richard's on Richards. Apparently, Art Brut's flip schoolyard satire carries a transatlantic visa.

Ironically enough, it was openers Gil Mantera's Party Dream that required a bit of getting used to. A squabbling Ohio two-piece, Gil Mantera and his brother, Ultimate Donny, have created a sort of dafter punk, made up of low-budget electro-drum patterns and squeeze-cheese disco synth epics. Mantera himself arrived on-stage in black tights decorated with white piping while Ultimate Donny wore a mesh halter top but otherwise looked like a Ministry roadie who woke up on the Fischerspooner tour bus. Initially greeted with incredulity by a crowd generally inured to the lunatic fringe, Mantera's vocoder and drum-machine performance of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" marked a turning point, due in no small part to a dance style that resembled horse ballet, as if Mantera's legs independently yearned to be at an equestrian pageant. Even funnier is the fact that Ultimate Donny happens to possess the pipes of a blue-eyed soul man, meaning that ridiculous Party Dream originals like "Elmo's Wish" were weirdly touching, even as Donny's pants fell down and an equally disrobed Mantera fondled himself under his G-string.

Art Brut naturally made a meal out of the momentum the Party Dream left in its wake, bounding on-stage for an ecstatic "We Formed a Band". Frontman Eddie Argos doesn't so much sing as harangue the listener like a drunk and slightly puffy English sportscaster, with generally hilarious lyrics about erectile dysfunction, slam dancing at the Centre Pompidou, and hating the Velvet Underground. Most of Art Brut's music doesn't deviate too much from a raw three-chord template and tends to end in a lot of chanting, although at least one new song (called "New Song" on the set list) is built around a more ambitious Television-like guitar part. Drummer Mikey B (who stood through the entire show) and bassist Freddy Feedback cheerfully took charge of the rhythmic end of things, but the show is all Argos. He led the audience in a brisk round of pogoing during "Modern Art" and then marched through the entire club, hollering the chorus through his cupped hands. Wrapping the evening up with "Good Weekend"—with its memorably silly line "I've seen her naked, twice!"—Argos had everybody in the room chanting "Art Brut, Top of the Pops", which eventually became "BTO, Top of the Pops" and, finally, "Bryan Adams, Top of the Pops!" Maybe you had to be there, but it was ecstatically funny, watching this man who looks like Alfred Molina with a droopy adolescent mustache and a bad tie exerting such command over his audience. "Good Weekend" lifts its intro from the Capitols' R&B classic "Cool Jerk", and that, funnily enough, might be the perfect way to describe Argos and his backward charisma.

Georgia Straight, March 2006