Ted Leo & the Pharmacists - Living With the Living

Time and again Ted Leo has proven himself to be a veritable hero of the counter-culture (if it can still be called that) movement of the present. A progressive and literate ethos plugged into a manic melody maker still jacked up on The Jam (and more than a touch of The Style Council, too) sends Leo and his Pharmacists into Living With the Living, the group’s most sundry alluring release yet. Single “Sons of Cain” is vintage Pharmacists, but Ted takes his Kinks proclivity to task on “Army Bound” (a fitting sister song to “Yes Sir, No Sir” with an guitar line lifted from “Victoria”), pop-punk heavily-seeded with hooks (“Who Do You Love?”, “The World Stops Turning”). “A Bottle of Buckie” is one of the songwriter’s more introspective moments, folky and host to what my untrained ears want to pinpoint as an Irish flute. Some tracks feel out of place—the reggae-inflected “The Unwanted Things” shatters the pace set throughout the first half of the record, while “Bomb. Repeat. Bomb” is Leo’s most politically inflammatory work ever, eschewing his melodic grandeur in favor of machine-gun drums and guitars, shouting and poetic commentary on the United States’ current military occupations and our country’s reactions. While some of Living With the Living isn’t the group’s most appealing work (its second half feels almost like another band), its best moments are brighter than most anything they’ve done before. Mr. Leo truly has a gift that eludes all but the most renowned songwriters, and it’s a shame he’s not yet in the same public consciousness that embraced The Boss and Bob Dylan in the States, or Paul Weller, Ray Davies and Shane MacGowan in the UK. Don’t miss out on it. [www.tedleo.com]