Imagine the Killers recording a sequel to Def Leppard’s Slang – swapping anti-capitalist manifestos for love songs – and you’ll have an idea of what to expect from Habeas Corpus, the second effort from St. Louis trio Living Things. It sounds pretty ridiculous on paper, but it isn’t a bad sound, actually – Habeas Corpus loses points for buffing up the rough edges the band displayed on 2005’s Ahead of the Lions, but it’s got enough glammy sass and swagger to overcome the added layers of gloss. Unfortunately, no amount of ‘tude can overcome lyrics like “Endless summer nights I miss you…There’s an island in your heart / I want to run into your sun…only love can break your heart.” You’ve got to give Living Things props for being subversively funny enough to meld an album’s worth of party-rock arrangements with darkly political subject matter – it’s hard not to like a record that puts a song like “Post Millennium Extinction Blues” within spitting distance from something as proudly, basically carnal as “Shake Your Shimmy” – but no matter how brightly this bauble glitters, it’s still mostly plastic beneath the surface. It’s tempting to wonder whether the band was trying to make some sort of brilliant meta-statement by cloaking its politically aware sloganeering in such blatantly commercial music – but it’s more likely that this is the work of armchair politicians who like to party. Again, that isn’t such a bad thing; once they get around to writing sharper lyrics, it might actually be pretty damn good. (Jive 2009)
