There is even more soul on this highly anticipated return of Ted Leo, after his break with Lookout, and his first release on Touch & Go. As it is all about great songs and the incredible distance between good and great and most people who don’t know the difference and writing more than one great song or one good album is rare, Ted and the Pharms really defend the slow continued death of the album on Living with the Living and any and all musicians who create a body of work. 15 great songs on Living and another 5 on a bonus EP, Mo' Money, there is much to be said about that type of piece verse the single orientation of music today.
The Lost Brigade is so Scram 1987 – a record that if you don’t own you need to know – I have 3 copies on vinyl. And “ Every Little Memory has a Song” is perhaps the most brilliant lyric as life is simply cut up and pieced together by music and songs for the many and the few. Who Do You Love is a favorite. I just drove Chicago to NY and then back through WV, KY through STL and home straight North through IL, with the first days of Spring through KY and the colors coming out, this record was a great drive. On a Bottle of Buckie I hear him going into Thank God I am a Country Boy and in Ted Leo's vast musical mastery and influences, what a short natural leap to incorporate Irish folk music into the diddy. Colleen is the Me & Mia for me of Living with the Living, though that sounds dumb now that I read it – I hear Bill Joel sometimes, the Elvis Costello I actually like. Hyper punk rock folk sounds foreshadow the vocal melodies as he busts very soulful falsettos on this one. Everything reminds me of something, or nothing specific, proving how great they truly is. So maybe it is just friendly and inviting sounds, reminiscent of something, or maybe that’s what a great song does, make you feel like you know or you have been here.
The Bonus E. P Mo' Money is awesome and like the alter ego of Living with the Living in its rawness and stretch. It goes deep into the range and essence of the writers, the pure places in the spectrum that got them here.
The Punk Planet interview is compelling as Ted Leo doesn’t do many of these when he tours if I understand correctly. I like how the writer learns from Ted that protest music is more about the feeling and people relating to the feeling and applying it to whatever they do and much less about really changing dick cheney. It then goes on to boring hypothetical conversation about major labels and what not, how predictable, can’t we talk about the his music and where he is at?
-D
