Living Things 'Ahead of the Lions' album

Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.(*)

Ahead of the Lions is the full-length album debut from the rock ’n’ roll group called Living Things. It is a band of brothers: Lillian, Eve and Bosh Berlin. Born and raised in the socially conservative St. Louis suburbs, they’ve been playing together since their hands were big enough to hold instruments, which gives their angst-ridden roar an organic relentlessness.

Recorded by Steve Albini (Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Pixies), Ahead of the Lions was tracked and mixed in St. Louis, Chicago and Stockholm. The much-anticipated work is due Oct. 4, 2005, on Jive Records. The lead track is the newly penned “Bom Bom Bom.”

In the early years, their father had a job laying carpet under the attractions at traveling carnivals and the whole family would accompany him around the country. The boys formed a three-piece – Lillian on guitar and vocals, Eve on bass, Bosh on drums – and spent summers gigging in parking lots next to the Ferris wheel. The main attraction was Bosh, a kindergartner dressed in an Angus Young-style schoolboy uniform pushing the songs along at 170 beats per minute.

Lillian, the band’s singer, lyricist, guitarist and chief provocateur, wrote, and still writes, the band’s lyrics. “Books, history and billboards are what inspire me to pick up my tape recorder and write a song,” he says, citing such influences as Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Carroll, Nick Cave, William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, Michael Moore, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, William Blake, Anne Sexton – and CNN.

School was not a comfortable environment for such a stubbornly free spirit. His brain alienated but otherwise clear, Lillian insisted on reading books that weren’t assigned, refused to read books that were assigned, and by junior high was generally acting out. He was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and prescribed Ritalin and Prozac, which he recalls in his forthcoming book, “Post Mortem Bliss” (Apocrypha Press).

“My mother ultimately said no to the drugs,” says Lillian. “She didn’t believe in it. But there’s this heaping amount of mood-altering drugs prescribed to kids – something like 1.5 million of them. And the FDA didn’t even approve Prozac for children until 2003. It’s making kids even more depressed and suicidal than they already were. How can society put the blame for high school violence on music or lifestyle when so many of the students are hooked on pills? It’s crack for kids. It’s part of the dumbing-down of the generation coming up, what I call ‘the blackout generation.’”

Home wasn’t much easier than school for the Berlin brothers. “We’d get grounded all the time for beating each other up,” says Eve. “Our parents would send us to the basement because we’d ruin the upstairs, punching holes in the wall and shit. We didn’t have anything to do down there except take out our instruments and jam.” Ultimately, they turned their tribal force toward escaping the suburban wasteland of their Maryland Heights neighborhood – but with a point of view, a desire to provoke debate on political and social issues.

Living Things released an EP, Turn in Your Friends and Neighbors (DreamWorks), in March of 2003. It was followed later that year by a 10-inch vinyl EP, released in the U.K., titled The Blackout Generation (Loog). Both were recorded in Chicago by Albini.

During the past two years Living Things have crisscrossed the U.S. and Europe, opening for bands as diverse as Velvet Revolver and The Libertines, Melissa Auf der Maur and The Vines. Along the way they picked up Corey Becker, a friend from St. Louis, to add additional guitar on the road.

Critics have observed of Living Things:

“Lillian Berlin is Johnny Rotten with politics. His art would be nothing without his rage; he’s so possessed by the need to get his point across that he grabs his brothers’ music by the throat and makes it bellow his tune. But his rage wouldn’t be much without his analysis, which however simplistic – and it is, though at this perilous moment no more so than apolitical cynicism or liberal equivocation – gives shape, purpose, and a referent outside his tortured psyche to feelings that emanate from who knows where.” — Robert Christgau, Village Voice, May 10, 2005

“It’s been a long, long time since rock music felt even remotely dangerous. But along come Living Things – three brothers from St. Louis who mash out an anarchic collision of power chords and screaming vocals that feel like a bottle breaking near your head. With the simplicity of the Ramones and the fury of Nirvana, Living Things would be just a blast of adenoidal angst were it not for their politics.” — Dimitri Ehrlich, Interview, December 2003/January 2004

“A bullshit-free, shiv-sharp union of speedy punk and melodic metal, it’s one of the most ferocious straight-ahead rock albums since Nevermind.” — Brian Raftery, Spin, April 2005

# # #

(*) from African folklore, collected by Father Ted Hayden, S.M.A., an American Catholic missionary working in Liberia, West Africa.

Lillian Berlin, vocals, guitar
Eve Berlin, bass
Bosh Berlin, drums

Do you also would like to share your opinion? If so, please register or login here.

Details

Popular Songs

New Songs

Living Things - Ahead of the Lions