It took more than a year, but Peter Bjorn & John's "Young Folks" finally turned into the kind of honest-to-goodness worldwide sleeper hit the mainstream U.S. music business hardly knows what to do with anymore. Not only did the single from the Swedish indie-pop trio's 2006 album Writer's Block hit #13 in the UK and crack the Top 40 in Germany and the Netherlands. Not only was it sampled by Kanye West and covered by everyone from the Kooks, James Blunt, and Pete Yorn to "99 Luftballons" singer Nena and Japanese folk-popper Shugo Tokumaru. Not only has it appeared on TV shows like "Grey's Anatomy" and "How I Met Your Mother", in commercials for Budweiser and AT&T. Why, the catchy little thing even charted in the U.S.-- where Writer's Block has sold roughly 160,000 copies.
None of which quite explains why the guy who sings male lead on "Young Folks", Peter Morén, has chosen to follow his group's breakthrough with, umm, a meandering folk-pop solo album loosely inspired by the sad tale of a studio-era Hollywood mogul whose passion for his work causes him to miss out on life. The Last Tycoon, now known as The Love of the Last Tycoon, was the final, unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The 1973 film adaptation, starring Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson, was the final (finished) movie by On the Waterfront director Elia Kazan. And Morén? Presumably, he's just getting started. And it shows, in a set of slow, plaintive love songs that flash occasional glimmers of his band's charms, but too often fail to even stand out over their stripped-down arrangements.
It's not Morén's indulging his self-professed "Dylanhead" status that hobbles The Last Tycoon. Folk-flecked acoustic guitar underpins some of the better songs here, stretching out beneath the caustic rasp of the handclap- and piano-splashed digital single "Social Competence" or dancing beneath harmonica on casual, intimate finale "I Don't Gaze at the Sky for Long", which alludes to filmmaker François Truffaut. "Le Petit Coeur", the track Morén tells Billboard gave him the idea for this project, adds strings and rumbling piano for an ominous, bilingual song about nighttime skulking, tribal conflict, and relationship brinksmanship: "If you lock me out again, I may not come back to seek you," Morén sings.
The album's vague concept can't be blamed for the disappointment, either. Sure, loping opener "Reel Too Real"-- with its synths, tubular bells, and knee-slaps-- examines the difference between images and reality. And Bert Jansch-esque six-minute epic "This Is What I Came For" is a cinematic character portrait: "You're the spoiled white kid with clenched white teeth." But it'll take way better Fitzgerald scholars than me to find other potential connections.
See, this points to the album's main problem: a failure to communicate. Fellow Swedish singer/songwriter José González keeps his lyrics elemental and his playing atmospheric, but neither Morén's voice nor the samey folkie backing here are strong enough to add interest to the clumsy rhymes and lackluster tunes of songs like "Tell Me in Time". Same goes for the sparsely orchestrated "Missing Link": "I've found the missing link, the missing link/ No longer do I have to think, have to think." Morén's words and melodies were as big a part of the appeal of his songs on Writer's Block as was Björn Yttling's reverby production, so again, it's not as if Morén hasn't done stuff like this well before.
In fact, he even does it here. Only once, on the electric guitar-based "My Match". With a spaciousness that's the closest The Last Tycoon comes, sonically, to Writer's Block, Morén delivers the album's deftest hook-- "I can't say that I plead guilty of theft/ But I agree I've done you wrong"-- and backs it up with a plea to "trust me, I trust you", mirrored by weeping lead guitar. On the Cat Stevens-like piano confessional "Twisted", spiced up by Spanish guitar and güiro, Morén sings, "Don't overrate yourself/ It could have been someone else." I wouldn't go that far. But The Last Tycoon shows that although Morén may not suffer from writer's block, he'd be smart to withhold some of his output. A lot like the rest of us.
