Living Things CD review

Living Things very well may have recorded the best rock album of 2003. But outside of critics who received advances of Black Skies In Broad Daylight or those who may have gotten their hands on the import, few heard the album because the band’s then label, Dreamworks, dissolved, casting the record into a mysterious limbo.

Until now. It may be repackaged and renamed (with three songs swapped out from the original) but the band’s Steve Albini-recorded debut is still as explosive as it was two years ago. A firestorm of scattershot percussion and power chords, the urgency of Ahead Of The Lions is enough to have you squirming in your seat while you listen. If there’s one complaint about today’s rock ‘n’ roll, it’s the complete lack of danger. Comprising the brothers Berlin — frontman/guitars Lillian, bassist Eve, and drummer Bosh — Living Things play their punk-laced garage rock like the fuse to their own implosion is burning quickly down to its last half inch, and they’re taking you and everyone else with them.

Lillian is not only a singer but a provocateur, a gutter preacher whose sermons are his songs. “We’re gonna win the war, that’s what all you kids are for,” he sneers on “Bombs Below.” He isn’t abstract with his views, instead encouraging you to challenge his politics, and his fight is a knockout, drag-down, bloody-knuckle brawl. His targets include military recruiting on “Bom Bom Bom” (“I said hey hey hey this is our birthright/To be bought and sold and shipped off ready to die”), the voting system on “New Year” (“I said deny our addictions, rig elections, ’cause they don’t care”), and the police on “On All Fours” (“Don’t believe in police, sir/pin me down, kiss the ground ’cause I wear tight blue jeans”).

True story: Lillian was beaten and pistol-whipped after a show in Dallas, Texas by a group of concert patrons who didn’t agree with his onstage comments about President Bush. They also fired a gun next to his head as a warning. A warning he thankfully seems to have ignored.