Legendary producer Steve Albini (Pixies/ Nirvana) turns knobs and pushes faders for lots of acts these days, and Living Things are one of the latest to feel his touch. One wonders if this is enough anymore to validate an album’s quality, and, I think, Black Skies in Broad Daylight shows that it’s not.
The problem for the brothers Berlin from Missouri, who make up the trio, is that good production cannot save a debut album (except, maybe, when the engineer almost transforms the source; say Andy Weatherall with Screamadelica). If the songs are not fantastic an engineer will not usually make them so, and LT are another band playing loud garage rock who sound like a sloppy Ramones. This is not a bad album, and if it was released three years ago it would have come across better, but now there is a lot of music like this around and it takes really good songs, and something very original, to make a band shine.
The artwork on the sleeve (iconic religious images set against bombs, dirty warehouses, pigs heads and the like) suggests it’s a metal record, and there are some metal, and lots of punk, idioms in their music; Lillian’s vocals sound like Iggy Pop (particularly on the single ‘I Owe’) melded with James Hetfield. The bass lines, percussion and lyrics (‘Where do all the dead boys go/ No solutions just bombs below’) are implicative of teenage years doing anarchistic stuff while listening to The Stooges and grunge. Indeed, with a reputation for burning and then pissing on pictures of George W. Bush on stage, this is lost liberal teenage angst all grown up. ‘New Year’ and ‘Keep it Till You Fold’ are nice tunes, showing The Jesus and Mary Chain and Dinosaur Jr. were also in their tape collections.
LT have lots of great energy, and do manage to maintain a surprisingly smooth sound through their thrashing guitars. If the songwriting, melodies and licks were better they could be worthy, so lets just hope they don’t put a ‘The’ in front of their name for album number two.