Best tunes of 2011: #21 Peter Bjorn and John “Tomorrow has to wait”

Much like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s “Hysterical” (whose title track appeared at number twenty-three on this list), Peter Bjorn and John’s “Gimme some” was something of a comeback album for me in 2011, even though neither band had ever really went away.

if you’re unaware of them, Peter Bjorn and John is a Swedish indie pop trio made up of Peter Morén, Björn Yttling, and John Eriksson (see what they did there?). They formed in 1999 but rose to international relevance in 2006 with their third album, “Writer’s block”, an excellent album that I love all the way through. However, many know it simply as the album that hosts the band’s best known song, “Young folks”, a great, great pop tune that if you don’t know, you should most definitely investigate. After their breakthrough, the three members took a bit of time to work on personal projects before coming back together to make a (mostly) instrumental album (“Seaside rock”) in 2008. They followed that up with “Living thing”, a darker experimental album, in 2009. These two albums, while interesting, weren’t my cup of tea. So when “Gimme some” was released a couple of years later, I checked it out without great expectations. Happily for me, though, it was a return to the quirky indie pop sound that caught the world’s ear a few years earlier.

And yes, this trio really does pop well. “Gimme some” opens with this tune, “Tomorrow has to wait”, an invigorating number that was not one of the three singles the band released from the album but it really could’ve been. It pounces on you with the tribal drumming right of the bat. Peter Morén plays the call and response game with his band mates on the verses but this reverts to a shout along fist pump by the chorus. This isn’t a song for watching the dance floor from the sidelines but one for which you could quite easily find yourself right in the middle of the fray, doing the pogo, something you swore you would never do, without knowing quite how you got there.

Yeah. It’s that type of song.