 | Peter, Bjorn & John |
Well PBJ’s last release “Writer’s Block” was one of my favorite albums of 2007 with some great hooks and just generally great songs put together in a nice package, and the fact that I thought they really brought it live didn’t hurt either. It had some very dramatic, epic songs along with some very sweet numbers (“Young Folks”) along with some big time indie rock outs (“Up Against The Wall”). They just recently released their proper follow up to that album (I’m not counting the instrumental album released last year) and I will say the results are decidedly mixed. They have certainly taken the band in a totally new direction, sometimes with unfortunate results, but when you look past the changes it is still not a bad little album.
The first thing I notice about it is how Bjorn’s recent producing influence is all over this thing, as it really sounds more like a Lykke Li album to me than a PBJ album. There are a lot of slow, dancey electronic beats and synths thrown in here with fairly minimalist production giving a very similar vibe to that of Lykke Li.
With the new sound though my biggest issue isn’t really whats there but what is gone. I feel like a lot of the things I loved on the old album have just disappeared here, notably guitars and the more layered, atmospheric sounds on some of the songs. The end result is that the songs are much more calculating and cold feeling to me, in that kind of electronic way, and don’t really take on that energy and life that a lot of the “Writer’s Block” songs had for me.
There are also some songs that just seem out of place to me at times, such as the title track with its “Lion Sleeps Tonight” groove, the kid-chorus singing “Nothing To Worry About” and the odd “Lay It Down”. I don’t really hate the songs, but I think these types of songs really just confuse me as to where the album is going.
The album is really not a terrible album but it is tough to love when it is so radically different from the last album and sort of has the sense that they were really trying to fit their ‘sound’ into this electronic/vocal/synth world when maybe it doesn’t really belong in that world. I think the new direction has yielded at least some great variation, but I never really thought diversity was a problem they had on “Writer’s Block”. Certainly with the artists such as Lykke Li under Bjorn’s wing blowing up over the past few years this album follows that trend and takes PBJ that direction, just sometimes with mixed results.
