Living Things, a rambunctious punk rock trio from St. Louis that consists of three brothers with androgynous names (Lillian sings and plays guitar, Eve plays bass, Bosh plays drums), have been around for most of the past decade, and have been making trouble since they first managed to make an impression on the national scene.
Living Things, a rambunctious punk rock trio from St. Louis that consists of three brothers with androgynous names (Lillian sings and plays guitar, Eve plays bass, Bosh plays drums), have been around for most of the past decade, and have been making trouble since they first managed to make an impression on the national scene. When they were starting out, the band came under fire from some humorless middle-America types for having left-wing lyrics and expressing blatant anti-Bush sentiments; dubiously memorable incidents of harassment included Lillian Berlin being stabbed in the leg during a concert at a Kansas City university and the band being shot at in an alley after a 2004 club gig in Dallas. Their Steve Albini-produced first album, known as Black Skies In Broad Daylight in the UK, was rejected by their US label and required substantial revision before it was released domestically a year later under the name Ahead Of The Lions. It took four years for them to produce a follow-up, 2009’s Habeas Corpus, and it too underwent some label interference according to the band, who were unhappy with the released version and had originally wanted to release a substantially different album.
Now, in 2012, Living Things have left the label problems behind by becoming the sole signees of their own label, Brotherly Recordings. They’ve released two mixtapes in the past year, Malocchio and Har Megiddo, both of which lean heavily on reggae-influenced postpunk sounds that are quite different from their earlier work, and more closely resemble some of the later Clash material. However, their latest single, “Fake It, Baby, Fake It (La Dame Nature),” makes clear that they haven’t left punk rock behind. Oh no, not at all. If anything, this is a faster, rootsier, and more straight-ahead take on punk than anything they’ve done before. While their earlier work most closely resembled a fusion of early Jesus And Mary Chain with Guns N’ Roses, “Fake It” is a hopped-up rockabilly tune featuring stripped-down riffs, bare-bones production, and an undeniable chorus that won’t be driven out of your head without the use of a jackhammer. Bypassing the relative slickness of their first two albums, this track fuses the Ramones and Chuck Berry into a solid sound that’s head and shoulders above anything they’ve previously done.
And the video’s pretty great as well; directed by Floria Sigismondi, the Italian director who brought us 2010’s The Runaways (starring Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie and Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett), its black and white footage and intercut narratives are a clear homage to the groundbreaking French and Italian films of the 1960s. After 90 or so seconds of narrative intro, the rest of the video takes place at a crowded house party, where Living Things performs the song while brothers Eve and Bosh glare at each other and compete for the attentions of a girl in the audience that they’ve both been hanging out with. The huge hairdos and vintage fashions on display in the crowd indicate that this video could be a 60s era period piece, but Living Things’s performance comes off as timeless rather than dated. The video stands on its own as an entertaining and humorous short film (complete with a silly twist ending), but two weeks after you see it, what you’ll be remembering is the chorus to “Fake It, Baby, Fake It” (“you know the sex with him’s no good”). This song is the first taste of their as-yet-untitled third album, scheduled to be released later in 2012. Here’s hoping that the rest of Living Things’s forthcoming third album is as good as this leadoff single.
The “Fake It, Baby, Fake It” single will be released on May 8th; keep an eye on livingthingsband.com for details.
