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Alternative PressThis is an album of spontaneous originality and should be appreciated as such. [May 2009, p.114]
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For Living Thing, they ditch the comfortable confines of the airy, featherweight pop they perfected on Writer’s Block for more sonically adventurous territory and prove in the process that their prior success was not just a fluke.
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The lyrics are by turns earnest and cheeky, but PB & J are most fun when they're feisty.
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Living Thing won't double as anyone's dance-party playlist. But it's an uneasy, bracingly honest soundtrack to life after fame.
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The Stockholm-based trio has also piped in a good deal of lyrical gravity--another contrast to PB&J's persistently perky first album--and the best tunes have a welcome heft.
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If Peter Bjorn and John keep putting out albums as challenging, intelligent, and emotional as this, there is no reason for anyone to get off the bandwagon any time soon.
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From the hipster head-bobber 'Nothing to Worry About' to the melancholy closer 'Last Night,' the trio takes a minimalist approach to creating beats and accompaniments, making its simple voices more affecting and the subtle production all the more charming.
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Living Thing isn’t easy listening, it functions best on headphones, and it doesn’t contain an obvious single. But music should be challenging.
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That shtick eventually wears thin on Living Thing, but on the stomping, squiggly 'Nothing to Worry About,' it kills.
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Living Thing is a quirky, cranky little beast, determined to defy expectations.
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The album is uneven by previous PB&J standards, but the band earns high marks for proving their hooks can translate into any stylistic language.
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The album finds Peter, Bjorn and John settling into a comfort zone that, while hardly groundbreaking, makes for intriguing listening.
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The sound matches lyrics about isolation and despair, achieving a freeze-dried catchiness in the opening songs. But by the end of the album, cleverness gives way to the bleak and the drab.
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The vocals come in a robotic monotone on 'I'm Losing My Mind,' and there's not much holding together all the rhythm on the opener, 'The Feeling.' It just shows that finding the right mix between melody and rhythm is a delicate balance, but these dozen tunes strike it more often than not.
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Living Thing may grow to become known as Peter Bjorn and John’s pirate album, a rattling, jangly near-hour of music that’s completely in step with itself.
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Swedes living la vida on curious new outing.
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MojoA surfeit of wilfully sibilant '80s keyboard sounds notwithstanding, there's little to dislike. [May 2009, p.103]
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Q MagazineLiving Thing, equally lovely and contrary, is somewhere between the two [albums, "Young Folks" and "Seaside Rock"]. [May 2009, p.116]
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While a faithful stab at synth pop, there's nothing on the Swedes' fifth album to match 'Young Folks' and, though more coherent, it lacks the eclecticism that made 2006's "Writer's Block" so appealing.
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UncutWith so many bases cases covered, there's something for young folks and old folks--even if suspicious folks will still need some convincing. [Apr 2009, p.93]
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PB and J also don’t lose their mass appeal here.
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It's a frustrating listen, ultimately. There's enough promise here to suggest a band full of potential, but you get the feeling that they won't be breaking out of that cult status anytime soon.
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All told, it's a rag-tag collection, and one that comes short of the band's high standards even allowing for the commercial backlash.
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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.
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Under The RadarWhile it would've been nearly impossible to live up to the expectations [of Writer's Block], it's hard to believe they so thoroughly confounded them with such a middling release. [Spring 2009, p.73]
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In an attempt to purge themselves of the jaunty millstone that is "Young Folks" and all the joyous indie pop that went along with it, PB&J have ended up with a purely draining effort. Living Thing borders on the narcoleptic.
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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.
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In addition to a deficiency of hooks, Living Thing is further crippled by an all too obvious absence of charm.
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But where's the joie de vivre? Sunk like a 401(k), it seems.
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It's not so much that Living Thing doesn't have good songs, more that they have been arranged in such a way as to conceal their appeal.
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The songs themselves are broad, indifferent things, no relation to the Thing that is this album.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 18
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Mixed: 4 out of 18
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Negative: 2 out of 18
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GlenMSep 3, 2009
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Mar 16, 2022
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DavidE.Feb 2, 2010