Here's something new -- a pop album with a unique, nearly indecipherable groove, one that takes a surprising amount of time to grasp. It goes without saying, then, that there's no "Young Folks"-caliber hit on Peter Bjorn and John's latest album, Living Thing. The chorus on the catchiest song here, "Lay it Down," goes, "Hey, shut the fuck up boy/ You are starting to piss me off/ Take your hands off that girl/ You have already had enough," which isn't particularly surprising, seeing as how this album seems to have been conceptualized as a series of character studies in intellectual miserablism à la The Magnetic Fields.
This is an incredibly slow album, one of the slowest this side of Low or Codeine. Sure, it serves a formal purpose. Their characters are mostly sad or stoned or nostalgic. Where on Writer's Block, the narrator of "Objects Of My Affection" asked himself "And the question is, was I more alive/ Then than I am now?/ I happily have to disagree," here they say "Forget photos and letters/ Of the people that mattered/ They don't move me no more."
Peter Bjorn and John aim to rhapsodize and humanize the banal and mundane, but the problem with depictions of banality is that they tread a very thin line between parody and mimicry. For most every triumph, like the sweet, woeful pathetic fallacy of "Blue Period Picasso," there's a track like "Living Thing," which is brought down by the weight of its pretensions.
The characters who populate this album feel deeply one-dimensional, and that may very well be the point: they could be poking fun at all the mopey hipsters who would actually talk about themselves this way. It's clear, however, that they're trying hard to impress their audience with witticisms and wordplay, but the only people who put up with that kind of ingratiation are hipsters -- everyone else feels condescended to.
Living Thing sits uneasily in some sort of odd pop no-man's-land: it's not quite smart nor fully-realized enough for the sad-sack indie set, and it's too despairing and insightful for the pop set. And I can't really blame either camp -- if today's miserablists are this average, I'd much rather hang out with the hopeless romantics.
1. The Feeling
2. It Don't Move Me
3. Just the Past
4. Nothing to Worry About
5. I'm Losing My Mind
6. Living Thing
7. I Want You!
8. Lay It Down
9. Stay This Way
10. Blue Period Picasso
11. 4 out of 5
12. Last Night
More about: Peter Bjorn and John
