It was the whistle heard around the world. You heard Peter Bjorn and John's breakthrough single "Young Folks" on "Grey's Anatomy". You heard it on the in-house muzak system while waiting in line to order at McDonald's. You heard it every time your co-worker in a neighboring cubicle deigned to whistle while they worked. But while making their unwitting entry into the North American mainstream with 2006's Writer's Block, the Swedish trio of Peter Morén, Björn Yttling, and John Eriksson used their busy interview schedule to talk up far less populist inspirations: the minimalist post-punk of Young Marble Giants, the rhythmic jazz of the Ethiopiques series, and other Other Music-recommended curios.
That this follow-up album bears more pronounced nods to PB&J's left-field and international influences could easily be interpreted as a reactionary riposte to their sudden pop success (also known as "pulling an In Utero"). But it also constitutes a perfectly logical next step in a career that's seen the band quickly evolve from a traditional Beatlesque retro-rock trio to adventurous producers of cosmopolitan pop music on Writer's Block. The deconstructionist ethic of Living Thing comes as even less of a surprise when you consider how the band's interim activities have played to the extremities of their sound: There was a digital-only album of texturally rich instrumentals (last year's Seaside Rock) and a stripped-down acoustic solo album from de facto frontman Morén, while Yttling became the go-to producer for veteran acts looking for some extra pop polish (Primal Scream). However, the fact that an album like Living Thing was to be expected from Peter Bjorn and John doesn't make it feel like any less of a letdown.
You could call Living Thing PB&J's companion to super-fan Kanye West's 808 and Heartbreaks, where a deliberate over-reliance on drum-machine beats and bleats is exploited to illustrate the emotional unrest and stagnation conveyed in the lyrics. The tension peaks early on with Morén's "It Don't Move Me", a diatribe against sentimentalism ostensibly directed at an ex-lover ("forget photos and letters... you don't move me no more"), but which could easily be about his band's own ubiquity-- it can't be a coincidence that the song plays like a virtual rewrite of "Young Folks" (ascending chorus and all) but with the bongos and whistles relinquished in favor of a hand-clapped electro-funk backing track and deep piano tones. However, if PB&J are committed to keep moving forward, they're doing so at a snail's pace-- whether it's the oversold optimism of Eriksson's twee-pop opener "The Feeling" or Yttling's half-baked stoner-rock dirge "I'm Losing My Mind", the sense of ennui and longing they're trying to express is all too accurately reflected by sputtering rhythms that rarely gain any traction or momentum.
The skeletal production is in turn matched by nursery-rhyme hooks that tenuously toe the line between endearingly naïve and amateurishly underdeveloped: The shantytown chant of "Nothing to Worry About" finds PB&J ably adapting to a post-"Paper Planes" pop landscape, but its clunky chorus line ("Do this thing/ This type of thing/ Put a little money in this type of thing") feels too self-consciously vague to make you want to join the song's kiddie choir. Likewise, the garish provocations of "Lay It Down" ("Hey, shut the fuck up, boy/ You are starting to piss me off") clash awkwardly with the song's congenial snap-along sway. And when the band settles nicely into the relaxed juju groove of the title track, it forgets to write a proper chorus-- so it just crams in a hurried rewrite of the one featured in the superior ELO song of the same name.
Not surprisingly, Living Thing fares best when the songs don't draw too much attention to their simplicity and lay off the gimmickry: the late-1980s U2/Gabriel slow burn of "Just the Past" (complete with lighter-waving fade-out); the tropical doo wop of "Stay This Way"; the Kraftwerkian post-coital glow of closer "Last Night". But there's a noticeable deficit of swoon-worthy climaxes to complement these meditative turns. Compared to the widescreen splendor of Writer's Block, Living Thing sounds like a noble but flawed attempt by Peter Bjorn and John to test the fortitude of their songwriting using the most barren and broken of arrangements. But more often that not, it sounds like they settled on the drum-machine presets first, with the lyrics and melodies thrown on top as afterthoughts. After hearing Yttling repeatedly declare, "I'm losing my mind/ That's why I ain't fine" for the umpteenth time, it's hard to shake the nagging feeling that Peter Bjorn and John applied the Writer's Block title to the wrong album.
