Live Review

Peter, Bjorn & John – The Button Factory

• 21st Apr 2009

Peter, Bjorn & John are essentially victims of their own success, doomed to be forever haunted by the sizeable shadow of their one real hit single ‘Young Folks’, a song which, depending on your viewpoint, is either indie-pop perfection or about as tolerable as that crazy frog.

Either way the song was impossible to escape for about six months in 2006 and it brought the trio a mainstream hit and a wider fanbase. And therein lies the problem, their music just isn’t mainstream, it is quirky, eclectic indie music played by three screwball Scandinavians. It is in keeping with the band’s idiosyncratic tendencies that they should choose to steer clear of tracks off 2006’s breakthrough album ‘Writer’s Block’, preferring to air material from their upcoming long-player ‘Living Thing’

This approach to gigs can backfire if the crowd prove unreceptive to the new material, or simply get agitated waiting for something they can sing (or whistle) along to. So how do Peter, Bjorn & John fare? Well it’s a curious melting-pot of hit and miss to be honest. The first track has the band in bizarre Kraftwerk-mode with all three members, including the drummer, upright and bathed in atmospheric red lights. The track itself is a lovely little electro-lite number which bodes well for the rest of the gig.

However their diverse and eclectic nature means the rest of the material ranges from the sublime to the surreal, to the somewhat banal. When it’s good, and it quite often is, it’s really good. ‘Nothing to Worry About’ has a catchy hip-hop beat to get the heads nodding, while ‘Lay It Down’, with its hilarious, foul-mouthed chorus, is a classy piece of indie-pop. But as the standard and style of music drifts this way and that, the attention of the crowd seems to drift elsewhere. They’re probably daydreaming while whistling ‘that song’.

The set does finish very strongly, with a handful of tracks from the aforementioned ‘Writer’s Block’ including, of course, ‘Young Folks’, which has a bit of new life injected in to it via a bit of midsong improvised bongo jamming. The wonderful ‘Up Against the Wall’ finishes off the set and is probably the highlight of the evening. All in all these Swedish fellas are quite the curiosity, infuriatingly inconsistent but well worth persevering with when they hit the right notes.

With more consistency Peter, Bjorn and John could be real contenders.