Peter, Bjorn and John - Lay It Down

(Muso's Guide, January 29, 2009)

Single review

Everyone has a light side and a dark side. No one is as angelic as Doris Day - not even Doris Day, by some accounts - and no one can be as dastardly as Sir Oswald Mosley.

And so it is with the Swedish Peter, Bjorn and John. They’re on the fifth lovely album of their recording career, spanning seven wondrous years, and heralded for the deliciously sweet slice of Sweet’n'Low-pop that is their 2006 single ‘Young Folks’.

A cute, accessible and eminently tuneful cut, the record - and, for the most part, that recognisable whistle - has been harvested ad naseum since its release. Stripped from its natural music habitat, this fragile beast has soundtracked TV shows, stings, trailers, adverts - probably everything including Match of the Day.

And yet, here is ‘Lay It Down’ - a tune so confirmedly non-Radio 2 that it includes two four letter expletives inside the first 10 seconds. At first glance, the single, trailing the forthcoming Living Thing record, is as far from the band’s pop roots as is thinkable, glittering like a dark jewel in their musical crown.

“Hey shut the fuck up, boy - you’re starting to piss me off” it menaces, and goes on to speak about a guy who, not to put too fine a point on it, is cosying up to the young ladies in a non-too-subtle way. Peter, Bjorn and John are none too pleased - it seems “you have already had enough”. The repetitive lyric is a real grabber, enticing hum-alongs for the rest of the day.

Like a prison-dweller’s fightface, ‘Lay It Down’ is nasty, putrid and wrong - it’s Peter, Bjorn and John’s dark side, armed with a shiv. The video, too, is a little slice of hellish fun - a brightly-lit ‘disco’ filled with people wearing masks of their own faces. It doesn’t get much more twisted than that