Peter Bjorn and John – “Seaside Rock”

Many people were shocked and put off by the release of Seaside Rock, the follow-up album to Peter Bjorn and John’s hit debut Writer’s Block which featured the absurdly overplayed “Young Folks”.  I’ll admit I was a bit stunned at first when I realized that there wasn’t going to be any catchy pop hooks steaming from Seaside Rock and it was going to be, for the most part, an instrumental album.  So I decided to take some time away from the album.  I came back to it some weeks later with a mindset that this was a single album from a band that I had never heard before.  What I discovered is that this is a pretty solid album as fars as experimental instrumental albums go.  There’s enough variety of melodies, grooves, and percussive elements to keep my interest (which is harder than you think thanks to TV).  Excluding the random foreign language story songs (which I might enjoy more if I understood a lick of it) the album gets a moderate thumbs up from me.  Does it top the debut?  Hell no.  Is it a disaster?  Certainly not.  Would I be pissed if all of Peter Bjorn and John’s music sounded like this from now on?  Probably.  But, hey…I’m all for expanding those artistic boundaries.  Go for it!  Yeah!  Booyah!

mp3: Peter, Bjorn, and John – Inland Empire

mp3: Peter, Bjorn, and John – School Of Kruit

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