Peter, Bjorn and John's performance last night was less a concert than it was a promotional event. As part of W Hotels' Wonderlust series, co-sponsored by Sony and Mastercard, the hitmakers responsible for 2006's "Young Folks" played an under-30-minute set to an unusually over-30 crowd. I mean, there were plenty of polished young lady faces in the crowd as well, including Julia Stiles', but the general assemblage looked more business-lunch than it did indie-rock. The rooms were indigo-lit, the bars were made of ice and the ambient twittering made me think of a jungle canopy. I met a film producer who was documenting photographer Mick Rock's documentation of Peter, Bjorn and John. "I'd like to document that," he said as indie starlet Parker Posey, sitting on the floor in front of us, rose slightly and bent over. He touched her back to get her attention, and proceeded to spit some game at her. A moment later, she abruptly stood and said she was going to see the show, perhaps peeved that the filmmaker hadn't recognized her. "What?" the producer said. "The show," she said loudly, quickly. "There's a band playing."
Peter, Bjorn and John's performance started off spare, with lead singer Peter Morén crooning perfectly while Bjorn Yttling laid a rail-thin drum beat on his half-acoustic half-electronic set. Morén's voice is almost inhumanly smooth: As he sang into the mic, it was as though the sound had already been recorded, produced and digitally enhanced. Ditto his whistling on "Young Folks," which the Stockholm-based band played for an encore.
After a couple of the somewhat minimalist songs that began the set, we were ready for the wildly infectious music we had come to expect after 2006's Writer's Block. The next song announced itself with a catchy distorted child chorus. The drums came on heavy, and Morén's energy jumped. He started running in place before the following song, in which the band tried to reinvent the '80s, channeling Genesis among others. Like Writer's Block was, it sounds like Living Thing (out Mar. 31) will be an album of wide variety. Whether it will be as catchy remains to be seen.
The band closed its set with "Objects," a ruminative Morrissey-esque tune from Writer's Block, resurging it several times for audience participation. Morén did the same with the encore: "Stomp the floor of the hotel," he said. "Make the walls come down—Midtown mayhem." But this was thick expensive carpeting, and not a stomp could be heard.
