PB&J at the Showbox

Remember a few years back when "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" came out and the Flaming Lips were suddenly everywhere? Mitsubishi started using "Do You Realize" to hawk their cars and Justin Timberlake was dressing up in a dolphin suit and jumping on stage during Lips shows? For a few glorious moments the hipsters and frat boys were humming the same tune, and no one seemed to mind.

Flash forward to early 2007 and find your sportos, your geeks, your dickheads once again divided, miles of skinny black jeans and 50 cent between them. A despondent scene, until ...

That whistle. You've heard it. Nearly 4 million YouTube viewers have heard it too. You caught your DMB-obsessed roomate whistling it the other day, didn't you? What started as a recording studio fluke has snowballed into the song of the summer, catapulting Swedish trio Peter Bjorn & John into the ranks of Lips-esque pop culture phenomena.

Lately, you can't turn a corner without finding someone who's adopted PB&J's "Writer's Block" as their album of the summer. Even a short-lived internet campaign was waged to stop the whistling madness: a sure sign of pop culture saturation.

Not surprisingly, the band played to a sold-out Showbox crowd last Thursday on their second visit to Seattle this year. Most of the crowd was no doubt lured there by the whistle. The surprise, though, was that these Swedes can rock.

We were expecting fun and happy, yes, but what we got was a commanding wall of sound and three fellows whose seeming oblivion to their own overnight fame was hard to resist. Don't these guys know they're in a Levi's ad now? They don't need to pretend they're having nearly that much fun.

Songs like "Start to Melt" and "Ancient Curse" filled the room with throbbing reverb and haunting bass lines. Crowd favorites "Objects of My Affection," "Call It Off" and "Young Folks" put the creaking Showbox floor to the test, sending the crowd (and band) into spasmodic fits of bouncing and dancing. Guitars dueled, voices harmonized, and Bjorn's limbs contorted into a combination of tai chi and beauty-queen-parade-wave like we've never seen before.

With shows like that, who needs a whistle?

*photo courtesy of the finest kiss