Living Things: Ahead Of The Lions : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The full-length debut by the brothers Berlin -- drummer Bosh, bassist Eve and singer-guitarist-songwriter Lillian -- is the most fucked-over hard-rock record of 2005: cursed by the collapse of the band's first label and subsequent rejection by nearly every other U.S. record company. But that hell was candyland compared to the wartime howling through Ahead of the Lions. What you hear going up in flames in the disco-AC/DC inferno "Bom Bom Bom" are the American men and women sentenced to the no-exit mess of the Iraq war: "This is our birthright, to be bought and sold/Shipped off ready to die." "I Owe" is an ode to Generation Debt: the Beatles' "Taxman" with Big Black noise. In "No New Jesus," Lillian challenges fundamentalist religion with the fury of a preacher packing John Sinclair's Guitar Army. The first thing that hits you about the songs is their intelligent design, from the metallic-Cars echo of "Bombs Below" to the son-of-Nirvana charge in "On All Fours." But without the hell-bent revolutionary zeal, Ahead of the Lions would sound like empty victory. Living Things are a band of fighters determined to make us all feel like winners.