You got Who in my Jam!
How do you know that Peter, Bjorn & John are European? They know how to turn off the afterburners at a festival. Reports from their sets at SXSW 2007 pegged the Swedes’ live show as “cute.” Given that their most recent disc is all-too-adorable with melody, that wasn’t hard to believe. Their performance here at ACL not more than an hour ago was anything but puppyish.
Maybe it’s their configuration as a trio, or the guitarist’s leaps and kicks – sorry, I could no more tell you their names than I could spell the surnames from ABBA – but suddenly I was thinking about Pete Townshend and the Who. Sure, the Who was a quartet, but instrumentally, they were one of the greatest power trios of all time. The Jam were an actual threepiece, but since they never translated trans-Atlantically, I kept thinking about the Who as PB&J stormed through their late afternoon set. At the end, after a cover of the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks,” when the guitarist pretended to throw his axe to his tech, handing it to him instead, I was sorry he didn’t just smash the sucker. Next time.
The uptempos, the machine-gun drumming, the harmonies woven overundersidewaysdown around the melodies; okay, maybe the Police is a better comparison than the Who. Yet there was a proto-punk edge to PB&J that I just don’t think of when I conjure the Police. Maybe all the comparisons are apt, and that of course is the reason for perhaps showering off the three pounds of water you lost today at ACL and hustling down to Stubb’s to see PB&J open for Paolo Nutini. Either that or hoping to see a guitar destroyed.
This article appears in September 14 • 2007.
