Living Things
Habeas Corpus
(Jive, 2009)

Oddly storied quartet Living Things have run into all kinds of bad luck in the original failing industry, but November 4th brought the worst of all with regards to their artistic output: Obama won. To say this rendered their new album’s Guantanamo-protest title and lyrics like “Glory days are over / Yeah, the glory days are gone” almost as unfashionable as… well, their music, is an understatement.

Songs called “Mercedes Marxist”, “Snake Oil Man”, and “The Kingdom Will Fall” are a bit late. While they would’ve made dandy supplements to Kerry’s presidential bid, they register in this day as big duhs attached to undeniable riffs. But “Cost of Living” is ridiculous—“Money don’t solve your blues.” Tell that to the foreclosure victims, Lillian. It goes on to satirize religious hypocrisy, which is so yesterday. Even Miley Cyrus did a global warming song, dudes. Time to shift paradigms.

A weird, misunderstood band to begin with, brothers Lillian, Bosh, and Eve Berlin (real names) raised a few eyebrows five years ago with the grungy Black Skies in Broad Daylight, a really cool title with a badass cover, the Virgin Mary flanking an A-bomb. That album never saw the light of day in the US, but a neutered and surprisingly improved reshuffle called Ahead of the Lions was released a year later to little notice. A shame because one of the additions was “Bom Bom Bom”, a sarcastic “Born in the USA” for the Iraq years with an indelible glam riff, and one of the most addictive singles of the decade. Even a good-natured iPod endorsement couldn’t scare up the numbers to please their label. So what’s an out-of-time grunge-glam amalgam who sing about writs doing there?

“Let It Rain” is a good hint. The first single from Habeas Corpus isn’t likely to be topped by anything else on AOR in the first quarter of 2009, with deft changes and a catchy, soaring chorus topped by an even catchier one that goes “Sky’s going black / Let’s celebrate.” Mass cynicism is rarely transmuted with such avalanching sweetness, let alone on a major label. It’s not as great as “Bom Bom Bom”, but it’s close enough and has more notes. Beneath all the autoerotic second-coming-of-Nevermind hype, what Living Things do is make outrageously good music from heavily Pro Tooled and uninteresting elements.

They use the same Gary Glitter shuffle as their two best singles on half the tracks here, probably scribbled into their contract by an “I Kissed a Girl”-hungry Jive, always to the same pleasures and same chopped-crunch effect. Those money and kingdom songs work it to especially good effect, stealing the backup chorines from Marilyn Manson’s amusing Mechanical Animals to sell their corruption-obsessed gospel. And four-on-the-floor ones rock too: “Oxygen” and opener “Brass Knuckles” have more foot than the last album’s misleadingly metallic “Bombs Below.” And even though they refuse to let up grousing about “working for the chain gang,” they know the only slogan that matters carries from presidency to presidency, context to context: “Everybody let’s keep the peace.”

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

Tags: Living Things, Habeas Corpus, Jive Records

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