Peter, Bjorn and John
Living Thing (Sony) 

So you’re at a party.  Parties are generally supposed to be a good time.  This party is not; it’s one of those parties, the heartbreakingly typical kind that for one reason or another never seems to get off the ground.  

That feeling of festive deflation is precisely how I felt while listening to Living Thing, the recent Peter, Bjorn and John album, a heartbreakingly typical tribute to apathetic hipster ennui.  Ironically, in fact, Living Thing boasts a playlist about as close to dead as I have heard since the sound of the beat-less heart of the deer my grandma hit in her Jeep last winter. 

Now don’t get me wrong; as mentioned above, the experience was heartbreaking. We were all rooting for PB&J to pull another Young Folks caliber anthem out of their delicious Scandinavian fedoras.  Sadly, however, the tracks that get pulled out of Living Thing have a mad case of rigor mortis. Each of them begins with promise but after thirty seconds I found myself repeating, “hey, shut the f**k up boy, you are starting to piss me off” as the band drowsily croons in Lay It Down. 

This isn’t to say the album is awful.  The first thirty seconds of each song has some interesting and promising beats.  For example, Just the Past begins with some upbeat bongo-esque percussion and simple melody but quickly morphs into some seriously saccharine mellowdrama when the heavy-handed synth comes in at the chorus.  Similarly, I Want You begins with a great electric intro, melds with appropriately simple vocals but is destroyed by the awful lyrics such as “cold feet/your sister’s so sweet” and “you act like a clown/ I don’t like this movie it only brings me down” and then repetition of “I want youuuu” ad nauseum. Living Thing routinely fails to drive home the point of its percussive hammering, a droning let-down of epic proportions. 

To be fair, maybe the album is an experiment in musical masochism. Or perhaps it is the ultimate in post-modern deconstruction of listener expectations; and we were expecting so much.  But I doubt it.  I think it’s just a result of poor production, lazy lyrics, and a band that is no longer the Young Folks they were–once.