Peter, Bjorn and John Living Thing

On their 2006 breakout album Writer’s Block, Swedish indie rockers Peter, Bjorn and John built a musical creed out of dusty minimalism, with standouts like Young Folks and Up Against the Wall taking up a sparse residence in the arena of lo-fi splendor. Along with efficient use of scattered beats and one-note refrains, the album glided along in an industrial world of its own making, somehow managing warmth and isolation simultaneously. In that vein, 2009’s Living Thing takes the playbook and elevates it into an art form, expounding upon the low-key immediacy of Writer’s Block with all the ambient noise one would expect from the Stockholm trio. Crunchy, fuzzy, and deceivingly austere, the album finds Peter, Bjorn and John settling into a comfort zone that, while hardly groundbreaking, makes for intriguing listening.

The album-opening, pseudo-electronic smack of The Feeling leaves no doubt in regards to the aforementioned coziness – the band has found their sonic strain and are sticking with it come hell or high-water. Thus, while Living Thing clearly avoids the joyful challenge of musical epiphanies, there are other, smaller ecstasies present, most notably the sentiment that Peter, Bjorn and John are masters of their craft. Every little detail is conducted with veteran’s hands, from the barely-bluesy piano line of It Don’t Move Me to the wonky chorus manipulation of Nothing to Worry About. The overall sure-handedness lends tracks a certain “greater than the sum of their parts” quality, while preventing the habitual use of brittle percussion from becoming a crutch.

Yet like many of today’s acts, much of PB&J’s aura seems plucked from motley influences past and present. The rollicking beat and reverb of Just the Past conjures up the ghost of Kate Bush’s Running up That Hill, while on I’m Losing my Mind (among other places), vocalist Peter Morén seems a dead ringer for Damon Albarn in his Gorillaz phase. That smack of familiarity works in tandem with the bare bones arrangements, and as such, Living Thing seems built on an unfinished sound – a half-molded piece of clay rather than the completed project, with borrowed elements meant to fill in the lingering gaps.

Still, there is enough meat on Living Thing’s gaunt frame to merit a second listen. The prodding shuffle of 4 Out of 5 is harmonious in a lawnmower-blade-through-gravel kind of way, barely dragging itself from beat to beat in dry heaves. Stay This Way has a cinematic pulse, plodding along in anticipation of all the sounds that will soon fill its atmospheric fissures. Those pieces never arrive, however, and thus only a few organ hits separate the song from its concluding atrophy. The whole process is a remarkable example of violating audience expectations to the effect of blissful shock, and provides the album with one of its more sublime moments.

As a final token of its miscellany, Living Thing comes to a gloomy conclusion on Last Night, a pleasant-but-murky offering that seems borrowed from the synth-shine of M83’s recent Saturdays=Youth. Even here, listeners are reminded that Peter, Bjorn and John’s journey is a work in progress, a mix of their own capable minimalist formula with more redundant (but tried-and-true) pop sensibility. It is a catchy and comfortable niche, for sure. Yet no matter how proficient its thread and string sound may be, Living Thing struggles to stand apart from its predecessors, functioning more as an appendix to Writer’s Block than its own quantity.