They Might Be Giants

I was born a dork, grew up a dork, and am still a dork, so I understand the appeal of They Might Be Giants. I don't want to reduce them to "quirky nerd-rockers with a few novelty hits" the way many music journalists do, as there's much more to the story. TMBG are essentially two parts Ween and one part Elvis Costello. They were similar to Ween in that they started out doing a lot of home-recording, would cram their albums full of tunes, and didn't mind hopping genres to suit their whimsical impulses. But they also have a lot in common with Costello, particularly their love of wordplay and tendency to be verbose. They've got plenty of bitter break-up songs too, and like Costello's, you have to think a bit to get at what they're really singing. However, unlike those guys, I always thought the Giants had a lot of "normal guy" sensibility. I'm guessing that they don't take hard drugs, court groupies, or destroy hotel rooms. Their one moment of fame came with the Flood album in 1990, and they've been a cult band ever since. And they have an astonishingly low number of songs that are about getting laid (somewhere close to zero). Instead, they sing about mammals, constellations, geography, and the World's Fair. That's why so many dorks like myself were able to actually identify with these guys. This was music for people who weren't that angry at the world and valued melody over attitude. But they certainly have a dark side that reveals itself after a few listens, and one suspects that about 75% of the things they sing about are metaphors for something else. It's almost surprising how many words they can cram into a song. My vote for the perfect TMBG lyric? "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of/Should you worry when the skullhead is in front of you, or is it worse because it's always waiting where your eyes don't go?"

Perhaps the band's greatest asset in the early days was their tendency to keep things short. You get the feeling that all of their first four records could have gone on for an hour or longer had they been so inclined. They don't do many extra verses, rarely take solos, and don't feel the need to extend a song beyond a minute and a half if it doesn't need to be. Most of their albums are like musical grab-bags; you never really know what you're going to get, and they rarely would use the same approach on two different tracks. Mostly, this is because these guys were not even a real band for a good chunk of their existence. John Linnell plays keyboards and accordian, while John Flansburgh plays guitar. Both of them sing, and they both have nasally voices that are hard to tell apart at times, though they do harmonize exceptionally well. They were able to turn this apparent weakness into a strength, allowing them to branch off into a bunch of directions at once. Their songs are usually catchy and melodically strong, though many of them double as musical puzzles that become all the more nagging when you find yourself listening to them over and over again.

Most of these comments apply mostly to their early work, which I feel was the best, but they never really stopped making good music. In 1994, they decided to finally hire a band, and their next few albums saw their average song lasting a minute or so longer. This approach opened a few doors and closed others, but it was probably inevitable. Since then, they've written plenty of songs both with and without the full band, with mixed results - they don't have the "every song's a gem" feel of the early albums, but you can still count on every release to have a few keepers on it. In 2002, they began a second career doing music for kids, which they were obviously quite good at, though it did somewhat limit their scope. Still, if you're not ashamed to give them a spin, they can be good for adults too, especially as most of the really clever material of the 00's ended up on those albums. So let's begin:

They Might Be Giants (1986)
One of the most important things to remember as a musician, actor, or writer is to play to your strengths. Here we have two guys whose instrumental skills can be described as “competent”, with no rhythm section and what sounds like a 3-figure recording budget. The album was assembled and arranged on a Mac long before that kind of thing was common. It all screams “bad self-released cassette”, but the Giants were smart enough to turn those things into positives and get a deal on a small record label. For one, the lack of a real ‘band’ aesthetic put all the focus on the songwriting, which the Johns were ace at, and since they had to give the album a raw and unprofessional sound, they were able to load it up with lots of personality. You definitely won’t find another album this disarmingly bizarre, relentlessly clever, and wickedly catchy. Part of its addictive nature comes in its fast pacing, which is its biggest strength – 19 songs, only one of which passes the three-minute mark, with half the remainder not even passing two. This was not a group that repeated itself – the offbeat experimentation (and there's a lot) doesn’t get drilled into your head, meaning the half-songs like “Chess Piece Face” and “Boat of Car” stick in your brain without getting the opportunity to get obnoxious.

As great as some of these are (I’ve always found “Rabid Child” and “Number Three” oddly amusing), the fully-fleshed out songs are the highlights – “Don’t Lets Start” spins an immediately likeable and upbeat hook with depressing yet clever lyricism (listen for the word “Don’t” spelled out in the chorus, complete with “apostrophe T”), “She’s An Angel” is a reflective and powerful tune with a chorus that’ll be stuck in your head for months (seriously), and “Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head” is fast-paced, nearly symphonic pop masterpiece. But these are just the beginning – practically everything on here is good, and there are enough musical references (of which “I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die” is the most obvious) and subtle jokes to satisfy even the most jaded listener – the way they emulate the Cheap Trick-style arena/big hair rock style in “She Was a Hotel Detective” is priceless, particularly in how they embrace the style and purposely get it completely and totally wrong, needlessly wordy chorus and all. Actually, the wordiness is one of the album's many charms, and hearing Linnell get through all of "Everything Right is Wrong Again" is always amusing. This group was aware of their own shortcomings – “Number Three” is about writers block, and the closing “Rhythm Section Want Ad” is not just a fantastically clever piece of fast-paced power pop, but also a statement on the band itself, who end the album on the line, “and here’s the reason why” – back in an era when CD players automatically replayed the disc after the last track was over. There are plenty of moments like that scattered across this album, but it’s their songwriting skills that stand out the most, giving this album tremendous replay value – if Andy Partridge was less angry and more whimsical he might have been putting out albums like this. In the end, the virtual rhythm section works as a positive, as no real band could ever play stuff like this. Perhaps not recommended as a first TMBG album – it’s weirdly inaccessible and creepy at times and really requires you to get into "their world" to fully get it. But once you're in, this album may not come off the stereo for a good while.

Lincoln (1988)
This may be the quintessential TMBG album – catchy as sin, long tracklist but short running time, huge variety of musical styles, quality all over the map (but generally falling on the good side), deceivingly dark lyrics, and so on. It’s more polished than the debut; the emphasis is now more on the melody, there are some hints of production work, and the ideas are more fully formed. That’s what makes this one the real ‘classic’ – it’s as melodically strong as a number of famous great albums, but isn’t as initially off-putting and bizarre as the debut (but don’t fret – it’s still plenty weird). “Ana Ng” is the leadoff track, and from the first listen I knew it was easily one of the best songs they’ve ever done – roaring, gated guitars, poetic and memorable lyrics, and a devastating chorus (as nasal as the guys sound, they do harmonize surprisingly well). Again, the album is a contrast between the fully-fledged out tunes and the adventurous musical sketches – this time, the better songs are mostly power-pop (“Purple Toupee”, “Where Your Eyes Don’t Go”, “Snowball in Hell”), and they’re uniformly addictive. But they’re also great on the other side of the fence – they tackle jazz (“Lie Still, Little Bottle”), jangly country (“Stand On Your Own Head”), samba (“The World’s Address”), and even showtune (“Kiss Me, Son of God”) with ease, dropping a number of tracks that are simply unclassifiable (“Shoehorn With Teeth”, “Cage & Aquarium”). Like the last album, the lyrics are a huge draw, this time slightly less cryptic but startlingly depressing – “I’ve Got a Match” and “They’ll Need a Crane” are two of the most devastating breakup songs I’ve ever heard, and the overall mood is generally melancholy, reflecting on money problems (“Snowball in Hell”), blatant corporate greed (“Kiss Me, Son of God”), addiction (“Lie Still, Little Bottle”), or a diminishing sense of purpose (“Piece of Dirt”). Even when the lyrics are more abstract, they’re fascinating - “Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn’t thinking isn’t thinking of” is one of my favorite lines by the group, and the album’s full of gems like that. If there’s a weakness, it’s that there are a few low points (the irritating “Santa’s Beard”, the purposely abrasive “You’ll Miss Me”), and some of the gimmicky tunes wear thin in a way that something like, say, “32 Footsteps” never really did. But forget about that – it’s musically impressive and lyrically amazing, and like all good TMBG albums simply does not want to leave the stereo. Start here if you’re looking for a way to break in to the group.

Flood (1990)
It’s hard to review an album like this objectively – I bought this over ten years ago, and listened to it nonstop. So much so that I ruined the CD, and I ended up buying it again about six years ago, right about when I got my driver’s license. When I got my first car it looped in the CD player for nearly an entire month – I had other CDs, but I couldn’t get these songs out of my head, and I had quite a high “musical tolerance” (even taking Fatboy Slim more seriously than the man himself probably did) that simply did not get tired of hearing the same songs over and over – I mean, the songs on this album were just so good. At the same time, my little brother (who I was taking to school each day) was positively sick of it, and the only thing keeping him from destroying the CD was that I was bigger than him. Maybe it’s the equivalent of hearing “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” 19 times in a row – melodically agreeable, positive and upbeat, but undeniably obnoxious. Simply put, it’s not for everyone. So here’s the scoop – it’s TMBG’s first disc after being signed to a major label, and their only platinum record, driven by three tunes that everyone knows – the accordion-led “Particle Man”, the catchy singalong cover of “Istanbul”, and the power-pop hook-fest “Birdhouse in Your Soul” which is one of their finest songs ever. Again, the music is downright addictive; somewhat hokey, sometimes incredibly bouncy (“Lucky Ball and Chain”), almost always immediately memorable, and often surprisingly brief. The lyrics are still clever, but often more playful and abstract (“Someone Keeps Moving My Chair”). In fact, “playful” is a good description of the album as a whole – besides the hymn-like “Dead” and slow, acoustic-laden “Road Movie to Berlin”, everything is upbeat – again, even when the lyrics are not (“Lucky Ball and Chain” is devastating if you bother to think about the lyrics). Instrumentally, it sounds cheap for a major label, but that’s something of a boon – the goofy sounding synths carry parts of the album (“Hearing Aid”, “Birdhouse in Your Soul”), and the songs play off the novelty value well (“We Want a Rock” would be nowhere near as great if it were guitar-based). If you’ve ever heard songs from this album performed live, you’d know just how much of its draw was based on the accordions, cheap sound effects, and synthesizers (not to say these songs don’t sound good live, but it’s their treatment here that gives this album its personality). This could be the most addictive album you ever own (it helps if you're a teenager). Proceed with caution.

Miscellaneous T (rec. 1986-1989, rel. 1991)
Released in the US after the success of Flood, this was a B-side/miscellany collection that chronicles the unfinished and unused tracks that didn’t make the first two albums. TMBG was creative enough that even their B-sides were worth hearing, and like the first two albums, there are clear highlights and a few throwaways, with a few alternate versions of album tracks (including a sparse, accordion-based “Kiss Me, Son of God”). There is some great stuff here – bouncy lead off track “Hey Mr. DJ, I Thought We Had A Deal” is single-worthy, the wordy and fast-paced “Nightgown of the Sullen Moon” holds up to the best stuff on the debut, and “We’re the Replacements” is a hilarious send up that’s just as much a parody as it is a tribute. So it pretty much has everything the first two albums did – instantly catchy melodies (“The Biggest One”, “The Famous Polka”), bizarre experimentation (“Mr. Klaw”, “Hello Radio”), and some brilliant, head-scratching lyrics (“It’s Not My Birthday”, “When it Rains it Snows”). But take out the alternate versions of the album tracks, the long “World’s Address” remix, and the phone conversation, and there’s only 23 minutes of new material here, some of which is noticeably underdeveloped (“Birds Fly”, “For Science”, "I'll Sink Manhattan"). I would guess that most of these songs originated on their famous Dial-a-Song service, which accidentally recorded an amusing phone conversation that tried to make sense of it all ("don't blame me if this guy's a nut"), which is also included here. It gets a good rating as it’s too fast-paced and fun to ever get boring – two thirds of the tracks don’t even pass the 2-minute mark, and the Johns could really do no wrong by this point (even “For Science” isn’t stupid enough to be trivial). And of course, “Hotel Detective”, “Don’t Let’s Start”, and “Kiss Me, Son of God” are all worth hearing again. Favorite lines – “A famous person wears the same size water skis as me/She’s got three cars, as many years I’ve lived in this city/her hair is blonde and mine is brown; they both start with a “b”/But when the phone inside her ribcage rings, it’s not for me”.

Apollo 18 (1992)
Although TMBG hadn’t acquired a full band yet, you can tell that was the direction they were going, as this album has guitar all over the place, plenty of horns, and a thicker, fuller sound. Essentially this is the middle ground between their adventurous early releases and their more rock-oriented later ones, and the result is incredible. Plenty to get excited about here - bigger arrangements, hardly any toss-offs, and a bunch of brilliant musical puzzles that'll stick in your brain; everything here is good, and a most of it is great. Songs like “Dinner Bell” and “Hall of Heads” are definitely catchy, but the better songs on Apollo 18 thrive on solid pop songwriting and multi-layered hooks – almost nothing here is one-dimensional (“If I Wasn’t Shy” excepted). If anything, they've gotten even weirder - they sample Dee Dee Ramone and give "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" an outer space rewrite, and many of their ideas here are even further out there than they were on the first three albums. That especially includes the 21-part “Fingertips”, a collection of short snippets of songs that don’t exist – the album was meant to be listened to on shuffle so the song fragments can intersect the actual songs, but it’s almost more interesting if you listen to it in order, sounding like one of those Time Life CD collection commercials as it jumps from chorus to chorus. That’s very cool, but that's just part of what makes this a great “shuffle/repeat” album – there’s enough depth to the songs to make them worth hearing over and over again, with a few ranking among their best. “The Statue Got Me High” and “I Palindrome I” are obvious examples, but there’s a few sleepers, such as the hard-hitting and psychedelic “See The Constellation” and another devastating breakup song in “Narrow Your Eyes” (which features some of TMBG’s best lyrics, and that’s saying something). Even the shorter songs like "Mammal" and "Which Describes How You're Feeling All the Time" will stick with you for a while, giving you a double album's worth of ideas in about 43 minutes. This is the high watermark of geeky power-pop.

Back to Skull (1994)
A fun EP used as a teaser for John Henry, including “Snail Shell” in original and Dust Brothers remix form (who they’d hook up with to produce a full album 13 years later – let’s not forget how in demand those guys where in the mid-90’s), and 3 songs that don’t appear anywhere else. Lost documents of They Might Be Giants, if you will. Only “Ondine” uses the full band though, and it’s good enough to have made the album. The other two are done in their old style, and they’re both pretty fun – “She Was a Hotel Detective” is actually a new song, this time a parody of disco, again using a falsetto. “Mrs. Train” is a clever accordion-led tune that speeds up as it chugs along. Pretty good for a 15-minute side release.

John Henry (1994)
This was the turning point of the band, as their rhythm section want ad finally went answered. For the first time, the Giants were made entirely of real people with real instruments, and they waste no time letting the world know it. Nearly every song here is given a full alt-rock arrangement, which isn't really a bad thing, but it gets away from what the Giants were all about. Getting a full band allows them to insert guitar solos, drum breaks, and odd horn sections, and as a result their average song length creeps up to a fairly normal three minutes. I think that's where a lot of the hate for this album comes from - whereas a speedy rocker like "Dig My Grave" would end whenever all its ideas were exhausted, "Stomp Box" adds in a needless horn part and repeats a few lines. "Sleeping in the Flowers" is a great power pop tune with a catchy refrain, but they decide to make the verses inexplicably heavy and add in a bluesy guitar solo. None of this is really irritating or distracting, but while earlier albums benefitted from cramming a bunch of good ideas into a short length, John Henry makes you wish they'd leave a few things on the chopping block. That's too bad, because there's about as much good material here as there is on previous albums. Their rock songs are usually well-formed and full of hooks ("AKA Driver", “Why Must I Be Sad?”, “Thermostat”, “Destination Moon"), and there are a number of career highlights here. "I Should Be Allowed to Think" is power-pop at its finest, "No One Knows My Plan" is a bunch of fun, and "The End of the Tour" is positively devastating, especially if you stop to analyze the lyrics. There's only one song that sounds like a holdover from their early days - "Meet James Ensor" is as good as anything they've done, and actually works well with the full-band format. Otherwise, most of the tunes generally work - "Subliminal" is a great driving song, while "Snail Shell" is a weird slice of white power-funk (and for some reason, the only single). The downside is that there are a few songs that are either bad ideas (“Unrelated Thing”, “Extra Savoir-Faire”, “Dirt Bike”) or just shouldn’t have been on here (“Out of Jail”, which is fine, but forgettable as the 18th track on the album), and unlike previous albums, they don't just pass in a minute or two. Still, there's enough creativity on this disc to fill the entire hour, and there are signs of artistic growth here, even if we wished they'd always stay the same.

Live!! New York City (1994)
No longer commercially available, this plays out more like some radio broadcast transferred to CD (complete with an MC and corporate sponsor). Surprisingly diverse selection of tracks here – about four selections from each of their albums, including rather obscure picks like “Turn Around” and “Chess Piece Face”. This is really nothing special – the band hasn’t been around too long at this point, the show isn’t incredibly well-rehearsed, and the horn section is overused to the point where it replaces almost all the synths on the studio albums. It’s not a big deal until the incredibly off-key intro to “The Statue Got Me High”. There is some pretty good stuff here – “Don’t Let’s Start” becomes a fully realized power-pop gem, and the warp-speed “Dig My Grave” rocks harder than anything else they’ve done to this point. But the main attraction is hearing the old drum machine-era tracks done with a full band; even if the results are mixed (“Ana Ng” just simply does not sound good live). Although it’s easy to complain about the band being a little sloppy, they’re definitely professionals; from here on out the Giants would be constantly honing their live act. Decent release, but probably not worth getting if you already own Severe Tire Damage.

Factory Showroom (1996)
I can imagine many TMBG fans rushing out to buy this album on its release date, taking one listen and declaring, “well, that’s the end of They Might Be Giants”. That’s not really true – they would produce a lot of quality work from here on out, but it was clear that the days of Lincoln were in the past. What we have here is a 13-song, 40-minute album from a band that was famous for banging out nearly 20 in that amount of time. A band that reveled in its uniqueness was now churning out songs that could have been written by anyone (“Pet Name”). The group has now turned to a sort of alt-rock power pop sound, and the results are mostly pretty good – they haven’t exactly forgotten how to write songs, and the excel even when writing more in conventional genres – everyone seems to forget that the Giants could easily be an above-average pure pop band (“How Can I Sing Like A Girl?”, “New York City”), and they can write a great rock song when they need to (“Till My Head Falls Off”). Plus, they haven’t dropped the experimentation yet – “Your Own Worst Enemy” sounds like it could have landed on the debut, and the oddball “Exquisite Dead Guy” and “Metal Detector” show they haven’t lost their ability to write an effortlessly catchy tune on whatever terms they deem necessary. Perhaps the most shocking track is the opening “S-E-X-X-Y”, which is start-and-stop disco, complete with sharp violin backing and lyrics that might be about an androgynous woman (who would have an XXY chromosome). Most bizarre is a song recorded on a wax cylinder at the Edison Museum (“I Can Hear You”) – it’s about as lo-fi as you can get, but strangely charming. The high point is “Spiraling Shape”, with a brilliant rotating keyboard riff and a great power pop chorus, and a few neat touches like vibraphones and harmonization that recalls “Ana Ng”. Altogether I’d say this is a good-to-great if somewhat unremarkable album – varied enough to be easily listened to all the way through, with enough memorable tracks to make it worth spinning multiple times.

Side Note: If you rewind the disc past the beginning of the first track, you get to hear an extra track, the short “Token Back to Brooklyn”. I owned this disc for 5 years before I accidently discovered that – needless to say I tried the same on the rest of my TMBG discs but got no such luck. In a time where “hidden track” simply means “unlisted track tacked on to the end” it’s neat to see one that’s actually well hidden.

S-E-X-X-Y EP (1996)
There is one really essential track on this EP, and that’s “Sensurround” – a fast-paced slice of power-pop with a fantastic chorus that remains one of their best rock songs. Flansburgh claimed it didn’t make the album because it was too similar to “Spiraling Shape” – a legitimate concern, but when you have songs that great, who’s going to complain? I’m all for diversity in albums, but when you’re cutting your best songs then you have a problem. Haven’t they ever heard of Kimono My House? Other tracks include a gentle cover of “We’ve Got a World That Swings”, the forgettable “Unforgettable”, and an obnoxious remix of the title track – the song’s only half-serious in the first place, and the Mortal Kombat-inspired remix sounds hopelessly mired in the 90’s.

Mono Puff - Unsupervised (1996)
Mono Puff was Flansburgh's side project, consisting of former-TMBG collaborator Hal Cragin and a bunch of no-names and outside musicians. They've toured and shot a music video despite never really gathering a fanbase besides the hardcore TMBG-addicts. Perhaps the reason is because they're totally faceless - Flansburgh is a decent singer and guitar player but doesn't really exert himself too much, there's really no consistency or overarching style, and it sounds like he's using a different set of backing musicians for each track. Secondly, there really aren't any great songs on this album, which barely eclipses a half hour and contains a fair share of covers and experimental "non-songs". But all told this really isn't a bad album - even if Flans is not quite in Lincoln form, he does seem to at least be having a good time, and most of these tunes do pass. The bouncy, ska workout "Dr. Kildare" is a lot of fun, and "Careless Santa" is a catchy tune augmented by a running drum loop from Soul Coughing drummer Yuvel Gabay. There are a surprising amount of ballads here, both good ("So Long, Mockingbird") and bad ("Don't I Have the Right?"), with the unusually specific "Don't Break the Heart" being one of the better-written tunes here, even if Flansburgh didn't write it. The other highlight is "Hello Hello", a cover of the Gary Glitter tune, and it's really cleverly done - it's sneaky and downtempo as opposed to the bombastic and anthemic original, and the way the call-and-response part is done is hilarious (cutting the "yeah!!" off after about a quarter of a second). Otherwise, this mostly plays out like TMBG B-material; hardcore fans will want a couple of listens, but it's too lightweight and inconsistent to really work as an album.

Severe Tire Damage (1998)
TMBG’s first (and so far only) live album, and it’s a mess. The good: there’s a fantastic new single that is easily one of their best with the full band (“Dr. Worm”), and a few non-album tracks that are much more spruced up and energetic than their studio counterparts (“First Kiss”, “They Got Lost”, and “Why Does the Sun Shine?”, a second major highlight), plus you get to hear alternate versions of their older songs using the full band. The bad: they don’t perform the pre-band tracks very well, the group sounds out of tune in places (“Ana Ng”), and there’s surprisingly little of the crowd interaction that the group is known for, which is probably due to the fact that half these tracks were recorded “live-in-the-studio” instead of actually being live. The songs are good enough that it’s far from disaster, but I can’t imagine any TMBG fan being satisfied with this after being promised a ‘live album’. The Johns have always recruited upper-tier musicians for their band, but for some reason they don’t seem to gel all the time, and they have problems translating the older material to a live setting. For the record, I saw the band live in 2005 and again in 2007 and they seemed to have worked everything out, sounding great no matter which era of the group they were drawing from (although I don’t know if they had kept any of the band members from the 90’s group). So it’s kind of hit-and-miss, and the group seems a little preoccupied with providing alternate versions of their tunes, even if they aren’t well-thought out (however, the near-acapella version of “Meet James Ensor” is a treat), and the set is too short for a group with over 100 songs – instead we get some half-written studio tracks and a set of badly recorded bonus tracks based on “Planet of the Apes”. So why does it still get a decent grade? It turns out that barring sound quality issues, live albums from good bands are pretty hard to screw up, especially when the songs themselves range from good to excellent. Live NYC gives a better “live experience”, but I wouldn’t want to be without “Dr. Worm”, plus this is at least in print. Or better yet, pick up one of their download-only sets on their website, which not only gives you a better deal ($10 for a 2+ hour live show), but is more than likely to include “Dr. Worm” anyway. Just sayin’.

Mono Puff - It's Fun to Steal (1998)
The second (and final) Mono Puff album. It's basically an excursion into white-kid funk that's decent but sort of unremarkable. Full review coming soon.

Long Tall Weekend (1999)
They Might Be Giants made history with this one – it was “the first album by a major artist to be released exclusively over the internet”. In this case, it was released through eMusic (which is still one of the best music download sites out there, although I’m not keen on the idea that an album’s worth hinges on how many tracks it has). I’m not sure what the term “major artist” means, but no one seems to dispute this fact, so I’ll give them credit - Long Tall Weekend made TMBG the most-downloaded artist through 2000, and the album remained the top-selling MP3-only album for a while. That would be a pretty significant achievement, but it’s really only half an album – this is more of a collection of toss-offs and whatever the band had sitting around in the vaults anyway, so it might as well be called Factory Showroom: The B-sides.

As a result, the songs are mostly thin and underwritten, without any of the dynamic production on the last few albums, as most of the songs sound like demos. There’s a pretty wide selection of genres here – bluegrass (“Counterfeit Faker”), showtune (“Reprehensible”), and falsetto-laden hard rock (“Rat Patrol”) all sound good, but for each truly worthwhile tune like those, there’s some kind of toss-off (the worst of which, “On Earth My Nina”, is simply an a capella rendering of what Linnell heard when he played one of the group’s songs backwards). Perhaps the best one is a Latin-flavored horn-led tune that was probably bumped from John Henry in place of “No One Knows My Plan”, that’s punchy and worth putting on repeat (“Lullaby to Nightmares”). But besides that and “Rat Patrol”, there aren’t any real knockout tracks here, and it barely feels like an actual album – it’s too short and doesn’t really flow well, three of these songs would appear on later albums that were released on CD, and one was the hidden track from Factory Showroom. It seems as though the band released this as a way to test the MP3 format without having to dedicate any of their future “A-material” or even really writing new songs (most of these had been performed live on the Factory Showroom tour). I don’t blame them - keep in mind that this is still 1999, and most people didn’t even know what an MP3 was, not to mention that CD burners cost somewhere around 400 bucks. This of course got a lot of the fans worked up (especially the ones without internet access), but kudos to TMBG anyway for being the first to try it out.

John Linnell - State Songs (1999)
I assume Linnell put this out mostly as a way to keep himself occupied while Flansburgh was in Mono Puff, because it's one of the least ambitious albums either of these guys ever released. In fact, the only reason why Linnell went with a "State Songs" concept (originally he tried to write a song for each state, but it was abandoned about halfway through) is because, in his own words, he couldn't think of anything else to write about. Despite that, there was a pretty long gestation period for this one, as some of these songs appear on an EP that was released in 1994. Instead of writing about historical figures or specific cities Sufjan Stevens-style, he writes about the shapes of the states (in "Montana", the central lyric is "Montana is a leg", which isn't really true, causing Linnell to remark that "the person singing the song must be delusional") or various topics that don't really have anything to do with the state at all until the chorus - in another one of his depressing but flighty breakup songs, he just casually mentions that "no one likes New Hampshire men", and that's really the only mention of the state. This may be one of the least pretentious albums I've ever heard – it sounds like he's being backed by a high school marching band, but only gets to use a couple of members at a time. The rest is basically the same cheap organ sounds that Linnell usually uses (almost no guitar!) and a bit of accordion. The mood basically sits somewhere between “silly high school play” and “casual day at the state fair”, which is about as lightweight as it gets, but the songs are at least catchy, although sometimes obnoxiously so. The best one is a tune about crashing your bike in “South Carolina” - not only the fastest and most hook-filled track on the album, but the only one where there are more than a couple things going on at once. Otherwise, there’s a ton of decent, catchy, but ultimately disposable material (“Maine”, “Mississippi”, “West Virginia”, “Montana”) that makes for a fun listen, but ultimately sounds underwritten and underproduced, as it’s the same type of “song-a-day” type material that TMBG was obsessed with during the latter half of the 90’s. I guess Linnell himself said it best - "The songs of the 50 states/the songs of the 50 states/I can't wait for my favorite one/I'm not gonna say they're great/I ain't gonna say they ain't".

Here's another great quote from the man himself - "I don't think that the songs are liable to be adopted as the state anthems of the actual states, sadly. I was thinking initially that that might be a nice thing, but thinking about it I think songs like 'Oregon is bad' are not likely to go down very well in Oregon."

Working Undercover For The Man EP (2000)
Another eMusic exclusive. Not a bad release, with a few decent rock songs (“On the Drag”, “Rest Awhile”), and a catchy Tijuana-flavored instrumental (“Empty Bottle Blues”). I don’t really have much to say about the title track – it’s fairly catchy, but doesn’t have a real chorus, and like much of the Long Tall Weekend material, it’s underwritten (this one would appear on Mink Car in an identical version, however). Otherwise there’s a purposely irritating alternate version of “Robot Parade” (which would appear on No!) that’s fairly amusing, and the short jingles the band did for “Radio They Might Be Giants” that are rather unnecessarily tacked on (especially since you pay by the track on eMusic). I guess if you liked Long Tall Weekend, this is about the same quality. Regardless, this caused quite a bit of backlash as it only seemed to highlight the fact that it had been 4 years since Factory Showroom was released, and still no talks of an actual new album amidst all the side projects, solo work, MP3-only albums, discs for literary journals, TV themes and movie soundtrack work, none of which was as good as TMBG’s other material.

Note: I was only able to find a 128 kbps version on eMusic, and I don’t recommend getting anything in that format, as music compressed that much simply isn’t going to sound good no matter what – what a difference an extra 64 kbps can make.

They Might Be Giants Vs. McSweeney’s (2001)
This is something of a holy grail for TMBG collectors, as it was given away with an issue of a literary journal and never printed again, with many of the songs not appearing anywhere else. Amazon currently has it at $125. Luckily there was a copy floating around on the web so guys like me could hear it. What happened here is the band was commissioned to write a soundtrack to a journal, with (I assume) music to accompany each of the pieces that it contained. It’s over an hour long and features 43 tracks, 35 of which are credited to the Giants. Churning out so many tracks in what I assume to be a short period of time did revert the group to their older, more experimental ways, but it didn’t leave much time for songwriting, so there’s a lot of noise experiments and half-finished tunes that make the songs on Long Tall Weekend sound like symphonies. So here’s the notable stuff – there’s a few songs that would show up on Mink Car (“Bangs”, “Edith Head”), a John Linnell solo track (“West Virginia”), a badly produced but nevertheless completed song that deserved to make the album (“I Am 40”), a whimsical and entertaining toss-off from Mike Doughty (“Frog and Banjo”), a serene piano piece from Philip Glass (“Modern Love Waltz”), and a 9-minute story reading that’s oddly creepy (“Rosalyn’s Dog”). The rest is mostly minute-long tracks showing the group having fun and experimenting with their equipment. I expected this to be fairly tedious but it was surprisingly enjoyable – there are enough good tracks spread out (my favorite is a banjo-and-wordless-vocal tune called “Swimming Hole”, but I have no clue who did it), and it’s always worthwhile to hear the Johns loosen their ties and goof around a little, even if it results in an album that’s 80% toss-offs. Unless you’re a TMBG-fanatic I wouldn’t pick this up, but I am and I’m glad I did.

TMBG Unlimited (2001)
Another promotion through eMusic – the idea was to give out a batch of MP3s each month, showing off the group’s more whimsical side alongside demos of songs both new and old and live cuts throughout the groups’ history. This was quite a novel idea, giving the hardcore fans more access while allowing the group to show off silly ideas such as a fake Battle-of-the-Bands contest (similar to what the Turtles did) and live recordings called “Spin the Dial” where the band improvises to the tune of whatever’s playing on the local radio stations. Throughout the 14 discs you got to hear almost all of upcoming releases Mink Car and No!. Also included a couple of live shows, one of which has them playing the entire Flood album front-to-back (although they realize halfway in they screwed up the track order – but hey, the album was over a decade old). I really like these releases since they dig pretty deep into the back catalogue, going as far back as 1984 - there's probably a couple dozen unreleased tunes here, and a few really entertaining covers (Prince's "1999").

Mink Car (2001)
Finally, the wait for a real TMBG album was over, and it’s more of a grab bag than anything they’ve released to this point. Hardcore Giants fans have heard almost all these songs before, especially the ones who subscribed to TMBG Unlimited, while the more casual fans were probably just happy to see the group finally putting out a studio album after a five-year layoff. I suspect the casual fans liked this one more - the group had already released some fifty-odd tracks through various channels and as such the devoted probably already assembled their dream version of the album. This is not exactly the best 17 tracks they’ve written since Factory Showroom (“I am 40”, “Your Mom’s Alright”, “Lullaby to Nightmares” and “Rat Patrol” all deserved inclusion here), and even though they’ve all been re-recorded (under the supervision of multiple producers, further adding to the album’s disjointed feel), in many cases they’ve made the song worse – “She Thinks She’s Edith Head” loses almost all of its energy, turning it into a bland and listless tune with mumbled vocals, “Cyclops Rock” loses the ska section and adds in a terribly abrasive guest vocal spot, and “Older” replaces the guitar with an obnoxious buzzing horn noise. The only real re-working that sounds fine is “Another First Kiss”, which works fairly well as a soft-rock ballad (though the fast-paced pop version that appeared on Severe Tire Damage was better). There are a few bursts of energy (“I’ve Got a Fang”, “Mr. Xcitement”, which features Soul Coughing’s Mike Doughty), but on the whole it could have used a lot more – while the melancholy feel works with the hookier tunes such as “Drink!”, it turns “Hopeless Bleak Despair” and “Hovering Sombrero” into near-nothingness.

So it’s uneven, but overall it’s a fine listen – “Bangs” benefits from a fuller arrangement, turning into the power-pop gem it was intended to be, and “My Man” is a thoughtful and catchy tune that resembles the better parts of Lincoln. The real winner here is “Man, It’s So Loud In Here”, an electro-disco song complaining about how everything is turning into electro-disco. It’s a satire both musically and lyrically, tackling the issue of aging rockers that attempt to rejuvenate their careers through electronic music (such as Cher’s “Believe”, from which this track gets its vocal effects, or Madonna hooking up with William Orbit). The fact that the Johns were middle-aged themselves when they recorded this makes it all the more brilliant. Otherwise, you'll have to pick and choose your spots - I like the cover of "Yeh Yeh" and the parody of yawkie accents "Wicked Little Critta" fine, but the album as a whole is high on gimmickry and low on songwriting, which hurts the replay value. But I do think it's better than its reputation, which was hurt by two things - one, all their previous albums were better (which is a little unfair since their first six studio albums are all great), and two, for fans without internet access, it was their first release in five years (landing on September 11th didn't help either), and for those who did, it was hard to shake the feeling that this should have been better (which I won't argue with).

No! (2002)
The first in what would turn out to be a pretty lucrative series of kids’ albums. The idea of They Might Be Giants doing an album specifically for the kids was a little perplexing (since their music was already kid-friendly) and a little aggravating (since their last studio album already took 5 years to come out), but it turned out to be a successful venture – if nothing else, it helped them find a new audience as well as get back to their more minimal roots where a catchy hook was all that mattered. This album was actually in the works for a while (it was supposed to come out alongside Mink Car, but it took nearly a year to find a willing label), and those who followed the eMusic releases will probably recognize some of these songs. Unlike their subsequent kids’ releases, most of these tracks seem to be ‘converted’ from unfinished TMBG songs, and several of the better tracks would have done well on Mink Car - “Four of Two” is another lyrical puzzle from Linnell, and both “Sleepwalkers” and “Lazyhead and Sleepybones” are gorgeous tunes that the fans who understandably passed up this album ought to check out. Yes, there is a good amount of child-like goofiness here (“I Am Not Your Broom”, “Violin”), and while this can make it a tough listen for those of us born in the 80's, it does allow the group to step away from the alt-rock scene and focus on the simple and quirky ideas that made them popular in the first place. For example, “Robot Parade” features a jarring processed vocal from Flans, but the backing is a soothing electric piano line that could stand by itself. There’s a few neat ideas here – a cover of an old Public Service Announcement (“In the Middle, In the Middle, In the Middle”, sung by Flansburgh’s wife), a simple and agreeable pop tune that’s as weightless as the title suggests (“Where Do They Make Balloons”, sung by bassist Danny Weinkauf), a bizarre instrumental that uses the same vocal manipulation tricks that the group used nearly 15 years past (“Wake Up Call”), and of course, the obligatory “listener participation” track that all kids’ albums have (“Clap Your Hands”, now a live staple). Linnell goes back to his ways of cramming a ton of words into a short song ("The House at the Top of the Tree"), and this time, makes a sort of game out of it. Best of all, most of the tracks don’t cross the 2-minute line, so if you don’t like something, there’s not long to wait. In fact, this is actually pretty close to their earlier, more whimsical material, though most of the lyrics are geared towards children. Still, I do admit to getting a kick out of hearing the word "hippo" sung over and over again. Longtime TMBG fans really ought to check this out since it really does get to the roots of what the band was good at, and even though the album is aimed at toddlers, they obviously didn't forget that the parents have to hear these songs over and over again.

They Got Lost (2002)
It’s a compilation, but since I have it I figured I’d include it here. Essentially, this is a collection of tracks from Long Tall Weekend, the Working Undercover For The Man EP, the McSweeney’s collection, and a few of the tracks from the Unlimited collection. Since you already know what to expect I figured I’d just say a few words about the group’s 1997-2002 period. You could really divide the group into pre-band and post-band phases, but up until that period, nearly everything they wrote was pretty good. The pre-band group wrote songs that were whimsical, concise, and surprisingly infectious, while the post-band group got by through solid fundamentals and a welcome appreciation of power-pop. However, after Factory Showroom, it’s pretty unclear where the group’s direction laid. The Johns were all over the map – they wanted to embrace the Internet and try MP3-exclusives, they were being approached by Hollywood guys to write music for film and TV, McSweeney’s wanted them to write a bunch of tunes for their journal, Linnell did a solo album, Flansburgh formed Mono Puff, they decided to put out a live album, and they knew somewhere in there they wanted to try a kid’s album.

This eventually culminated in Mink Car and No!, two albums that definitely had moments and were good listens, but were nowhere near as stunning as Lincoln or John Henry. I’m guessing this can be attributed to a change in work ethic – if you count side projects and solo albums, they wrote about 6-7 albums worth of material in those 5 years, as opposed to the album-every-two-years approach they used for a decade. I had always wondered why I liked the early albums much more than the Long Tall Weekend stuff – they were both made up of shorter songs with varying genres, but looking back at songs like “Everything Right is Wrong Again” or “Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head” (just to name the first two off their debut), you can see that their early stuff really did have fairly complex hooks and arrangements in addition to their punchy and concise nature. Compare this to their recent (circa 2002) material – nice hooks, some replay value, lots of variety, but ultimately nothing groundbreaking or mindblowing, and many of the songs seem unfinished. They don't necessarily seem to stand out from any other quirky alternative group. Listening to this album – basically a ‘best of’ among the material that didn’t make Mink Car or No! (although it doesn’t contain “I Am 40” or “Lullaby to Nightmares”, two of my favorites from this period), it’s clear that they really could have notched another two great albums if they had just decided to flesh out the better material and focus on making a great album as opposed to just a diverse one. Some of these songs have good ideas, but aren’t quite there yet (“Words Are Like”, “Reprehensible”), and they do pretty well for a band that working at this pace. As for They Got Lost - it’s a good collection for the dedicated TMBG fan who’s not hardcore enough to seek out the eMusic or McSweeney’s stuff, but in the end, you have to wonder how good a lot of this could have sounded at the hands of an actual producer – they’ve already proved that the title track can becoming a rousing rock song as opposed to the boring dirge it is here, so it only follows to wonder what else they could have done.

Bed, Bed, Bed (2003)
A 4-song EP that’s a companion piece to No! with an accompanying book. What can I say – I’m enough of a fanatic to spend a good while searching out the MP3s. Anyways, three of these songs are new (the fourth is a kid singing the title track), and they’re slightly less kid-oriented than the material that made the album. “Happy Doesn’t Have To Have an Ending” is a neat funk number with enough distinct sections to make it seem longer than just two and a half minutes, and “Idlewild” is a trippy lullaby that displays a great sense of harmony from Flans and is one of my favorite TMBG tracks of the new decade. Sadly this is the only place it appears.

Indestructible Object (2004)
5-song teaser EP for The Spine. Opener “Am I Awake?” was the theme to a TV-documentary series, and it’s fairly unique in the TMBG songbook – the electronic noises and skittering beats suggest an outside producer (similar to “Man, It’s So Loud In Here”), and for now the technique works. Other tracks include a full-band remake of the early B-side “Ant” and a surprisingly well-sung cover of the Beach Boys “Caroline, No”, as well as two songs from the upcoming LP – sadly, they’re the worst ones on here.

The Spine (2004)
John Flansburgh, attempting to describe why "Sensurround" was left off of Factory Showroom: "For me, I think of every song as its own thing. I think it's interesting to see the shape of an album after it's put together; you can create a different listening experience depending on how you stack up the songs. The most discipline that we ever apply to an album sequence is avoiding like-sounding songs. If we have too many mid-tempo songs, we'll leave a couple of them off. Or if we have a better example of a song than another, we tend to leave the second-rate one off." Ignoring the fact that I find “Sensurround” to be perhaps the best song of the Factory Showroom era, I really do like the sentiment behind this statement. So it's disappointing to find them pretty much ignoring that completely - here comes The Spine, a disc that fills nearly the entire first half with mid-tempo rockers, of which only “Experimental Film” makes an impression. No, none of these songs are bad in isolation, but stacked one after another gives the album a really bland feel, completely atypical of what we’ve come to expect from these guys. The experimentation is toned down – there’s auto-tune on “Bastard Wants to Hit Me”, and one song that’s reminiscent of Flood but only about half as catchy (“Stalk of Wheat”). Other than that, they’ve almost fully transformed into your typical rock band, although the lyrical puzzles are still abound – Linnell sings about resignation from life (“Memo to Human Resources”), drug addiction (“Thunderbird”), and bizarre strings of cause-and-effect relationships (“Wearing a Raincoat”). The unfortunate thing is that the lyrics are the really the only interesting parts of them. I’m not exactly sure what happened here – maybe they purposely decided to write a more “adult” album to offset the kids’ one – but this group never really did the “mature adult rock” thing in the first place. The saving grace of the album is that side 2 has a few legitimately great tracks - “Museum of Idiots” gets by on a strong and punchy horn section, “Damn Good Times” is an energetic slice of power-pop with an accelerating guitar solo ending, and “Broke In Two” rides a wonky guitar line into the stratospheres of catchiness that this group was always capable of. But other than those tracks (and “Experimental Film”), there’s little on here you’ll want to hear again. So give it credit for those few great songs and making an album that’s at least listenable all the way through, but you know the band can do better than this. It's funny to hear them sing on "Stalk of Wheat" that they're "out of ideas", but less funny when it actually seems true.

The Spine Surfs Alone (2004)
A 7-track EP sold online alongside The Spine on They Might Be Giants' official website. I guess it consists of the songs that didn't make the album, weren't fully developed enough to be considered, or fell too-much into the genre of self-parody ("Now is Strange", a "Rat Patrol" knockoff). It's barely 10 minutes long, but it's not a bad listen, showing off a sense of adventure that the LP lacked. The highlight is "Fun Assassin", which is my favorite track off either release - it's sinister yet calm, and Robin Goldwasser's backing vocals harmonize extremely well (the lead was taken by the drummer from Space Hogg, but it sounds enough like Flansy to not stand out - like, it's almost uncanny). Her vocals alone make the track worth it, but it's still a fantastically catchy tune besides. The rest of the EP is mostly forgettable, but as a companion piece it's worth a few spins.

Almanac (2004)
For the 2004 tour (and sporadically after that), They Might Be Giants decided to take a soundboard recording of every show they did and sell them online for $10. I really like this idea - it fits the band well, as they have 300-some songs and the setlist changes daily. It benefits the fans - who wouldn't like to have a soundboard recording of a show they went to of one of their favorite bands? Or at least have the opportunity to skim a year's worth of setlists and pick the live recordings they want to hear? And the band themselves gets to take all the profits? Sounds like a win/win to me - especially as the shows themselves are nearly 2 hours long, $10 is really not a bad price. As for this release - it's essentially a 'best of' of these 2004 shows, but I'm not entirely sure what criteria they used to determine what was the 'best', and you're better off just browsing through the available shows and finding the setlist that you like the best - not only do you get a complete show, but you get more than what exists here. I've heard a number of them and the quality is pretty consistent - you got Flansburgh doing his faux-rock star shtick, lots of funny stage banter, some nice reworkings of a few tunes (the stuff from No! sounds surprisingly good here), and a band that's generally fairly tight. There are lots of tunes from The Spine, but they sound better mixed in with the other stuff, and they generally seem to pull the better tracks, which is a big plus ("Damn Good Times" is a showstopper, as it was probably intended to be). I have to give credit to Flansburgh, who really does seem like a naturally witty guy and really knows how to liven up the shows. Overall probably should rate higher, but I just don't find anything special about this selection of tracks - in fact, listening to the other live sets I have from this era, they didn't even seem to be trying too hard to find the 'best' stuff. Not a bad collection in its own right, but the actual full shows are just all around a better choice.

Venue Songs (2004)
One of the cool quirks about the 2004 tour is that the group would write songs on the road specific to each venue, insert them into the set, and never play them again (at least, in the vast majority of cases). It plays a little like Linnell's State Songs project - each of the songs are named after the city and are loosely related to the venue, but they generally go off on unrelated tangents. This disc (which originally came with a DVD) showcases 31 new TMBG songs, some live and some during soundcheck, in less than 50 minutes. Now it’s one thing to be at a show where the band plays a special song they wrote just for that gig, but can you listen to fifty minutes worth of them? As it turns out, it’s not just listenable but a lot of fun too. I'd almost forgotten how good the Johns are at this sort of thing - Venue Songs is, of course, too hastily written to really be a great album in its own right, but it is a lot of fun. The songs are catchy and concise without any of the overthinking that marred The Spine, and there's enough genre-hopping to recall the early days. Probably the best thing about it is that it allows the Giants to do things that they'd never attempt on an actual album - use vulgarities, try speed punk, put on bad accents, and even do a parody of Yes - the lyrics of "Dallas" (which resembles "We Have Heaven") include "Tell the moon you've seen the serpent/Found the sword/And walked upon the trees" - Jon Anderson would be proud. Likewise, there’s a great tribute to The Who – “Leeds”, which is of course the venue where their famous live album was recorded. A number of these songs would probably work fine on an actual album if they were fleshed out a bit - they're weightless enough that they go over well live, and catchy enough to stick in your head for a while. The “Richards on Richards” song (Vancover) is a prime example, but there are many others – “Asbury Park” and “London” display the same effortlessly whimsical and catchy style of songwriting that was a major boon to their first two albums, and like on their good albums, the songs are never long enough to be irritating. The reason why it doesn't score higher is the lack of any real first-rate material - a lot of these songs are downright forgettable, and only a few of the tracks give off the vibe of being truly finished. Either way I take it as a good sign for the Giants.

Here Come the ABCs! (2005)
A second album for kids, the one that really kickstarted a second career for the Giants. A concept album about the alphabet isn't exactly going to make Ray Davies jealous, and as a CD it's a little confusing; it's usually packaged with a DVD, and some of the songs don't really make sense without them. Of course I'm not in the target market, but I do appreciate kids music - when it's effortlessly catchy, goofy, and clever, it's pretty fun. Seeing as that describes most of They Might Be Giants discography, it's no surprise that they have a winner here. Here the Johns take the Schoolhouse Rock approach; write solid tunes with catchy hooks that'll force the tykes to learn by having them play in their mind over and over. The leadoff is "Alphabet of Nations", which they played live both times I saw them; it's not much more than a cute tune in which the Johns trade off naming countries down the alphabet (although I think they made up the "X" one), but I do smile every time I hear it. Most of the songs on here are short, simple and somewhat nonsensical, but still plenty of fun - "I C U" is an exercise in forming sentences out of letters that sound like words, and there's a lot of opportunities for the Johns to do funny voices ("D & W"). There are enough highlights to make this more than just another mediocre post-Factory Showroom TMBG album - "Can You Find It?" is classic Linnell that's as brilliant as some of his Lincoln-era tunes, "C is for Conifers" is a beautiful, surprisingly sincere ballad about trees, "D Is For Drums" is funky, hilarious, and seemingly improvised (Flansburgh puts on his live persona here), and Marty Beller's "Alphabet Lost and Found" is a well-written pop tune with more than a few word riddles. Flansburgh's "Pictures of Pandas Painting" is a song about alliteration with a full-on psychedelic arrangement, which is clever in a way that most kids aren't going to pick up on. In fact, I find this funnier and more charming than most of the Johns' other post-Apollo 18 work. I still wouldn't recommend this to anyone who couldn't appreciate kids' music - yeah, the lyrics are silly and shallow, but it's disarmingly clever and well made. Either way it allows the Giants to step away from their rock personas and do what they do best, and the result is some of their best work in a long time - making kids albums in addition to their regular music career left the Johns revitilized instead of strained, and the results of that certainly show here.

Podcast Highlights (2006)
Released after a year of podcastin', this was a promotional non-commercial release, which of course meant it hit the BitTorrent trackers a few minutes after it was released. This 14-track compilation is basically a grab bag of the different tracks featured on the podcast - one live track ("Damn Good Times", same recording as the one from Almanac), one live-in-the-studio ("Metal Detector"), one live-on-wax-cylinder ("The Edison Museum"), a remix by the Elegant Too ("E Eats Everything", which turns into a club-bound track with the letter "E" repeated over and over, if you didn't see the irony), some spoken word pieces and a few new tracks ranging from weird to really bizarre. There's not much overlap with the Cast Your Pod To The Wind disc that came with The Else, so if you liked that disc try to track down a copy of this. "I Enjoy Being a Boy", "Yeah, the Deranged Millionaire", and "Miniature Sidewalk Whirlwind" are all album-quality, but probably a little too weird and unlike TMBG to have made one. I'm glad they get the airing they do here because they don't deserve to be relegated to a podcast. And then there's some really weird stuff like "P.S.O.K." which samples a bunch of ridiculous Paul Stanley stage banter. Linnell gets in a couple of spoken-word pieces - he does a parody on DVD commentary tracks by doing a commentary of one of their own songs, complete with some really terrible celebrity impressions, and the bizarre "Turtle Songs of North America" is hilarious. It's all tossed off and of varying quality, but in the end I'm glad this exists.

The Else (2007)
One of the consequences of making separate albums for kids and adults is that it pretty much guarantees that most of the goofy and unique ideas will ultimately end up on the kids' albums. What would have happened to "Cowtown" or "Particle Man" if they had started making them now? The Spine did show some hope in showcasing TMBG as a bona fide rock band, as plain and average as all the rest. Three years later, it seems like they figured it out - The Else doesn't experiment much, but the songs are good enough to show why these guys made it in the first place. Getting the Dust Brothers to produce half the tracks was an inspired stroke, and you can hear all sorts of interesting drum loops and electronic noise throughout the album (some of which is kind of unwelcome, but overall I'd say they did more good than bad). Even when they're doing rock songs that are more or less standard, they're written and produced well enough to bounce around in your head for a while ("Take Out the Trash", "Feign Amnesia"), and there's a number of nice surprises - the funky "Withered Hope" continues the TMBG tradition of building a great tune around a strong horn part, and "With the Dark" takes the song fragment idea of "Fingertips" and makes a three minute "Supper's Ready"-type epic out of it. Probably the best thing about this album is it shows that the Johns' gift for clever songwriting and creative hooks never really left them - "Careful What You Pack" is a dreamy and apprehensive pop song that could easily have landed on Lincoln 20 years back, and the disc includes a theme song to a fictional band that could be their catchiest song in a decade ("The Mesopotamians"). Not all the tunes are winners - "Contrecoup" seems unfinished, and "Bird of the Bee of the Moth" sounds like an outtake from one of their kids' albums (though it may get stuck in your head for days at a time). But there are a few constants - the production is great, leaving lots of nice touches in the mix to go and rediscover, and the lyrics are finally quotable again - there are plenty of clever lines ("if the bass doesn't get you, the treble will get you" is a favorite of mine, and the lyrics to "The Mesopotamians" are twisted and hilarious in a way that only Linnell could pull off). In the end, I do wish there were a few more great songs on here - it doesn't measure up to their early masterpieces, but I do feel comfortable in saying that this is their best full-length effort in over a decade.

Cast Your Pod to the Wind (2007)
They Might Be Giants may just be the band best-suited to the podcast format – they’re big proponents of new distribution methods, they have a huge cult following, they love to do goofy spoken-word segments, they’ve been around 25 years to this point and have a vault full of odd unreleased tracks and live shows, they’re prolific and write plenty of toss-offs, and they love putting on personas. This is a bonus disc released with the first printing of The Else that collects a bunch of these podcast-exclusive tracks and puts them onto one collection, mostly re-recorded and presented in CD quality (there exists another CD compilation, Podcast Highlights, that is similar to this one). It’s a bit light on musical substance, as many of the songs are only two- or three-chorders, and many of the 23 tracks are forgettable, but I’m glad this disc exists – like Venue Songs, it shows that TMBG can be fairly clever and adventurous even when they’re doing toss-offs, and the album as a whole barely lasts 40 minutes anyway. Highlights include the infectious “Brain Problem Situation”, the old-style R&B “Yeah, the Deranged Millionaire”, and the hilarious “We Live in a Dump”, which features Beach Boys-esque harmonies in what could be TMBG’s most pop-oriented song in nearly a decade. Other tracks include a station ID, a live performance of “Metal Detector”, and a song called “She Was a Hotel Detective in the Future”. It’s certainly worthwhile as a bonus disc, and on top of that provides a good argument for TMBG to go back to their more experimental and whimsical approach, as a few of these tracks could have easily made it on their early albums.

Here Come the 123s (2008)
Another kids album, and like the last one it’s full of tunes that are short, playful, and educational. The aim here was to make songs that are simple and catchy enough to make them stick in the minds of kids as young as 3, but sophisticated and musically competent enough to appeal to the adults who will be forced to listen to them on a daily basis. It apparently worked too, as the album ended up winning a Grammy (against what type of competition, I can only speculate). It’s structured a lot like the ABC’s album – most of the songs focus on a single number, and there’s even another tune about drums (“Heart of the Band”). These songs are just as catchy as the ones I still remember from my childhood (“Seven Days of the Week (I Never Go to Work)”, “The Secret Life of Six”), and the whole thing is a batch of goofy, unpretentious fun. Even I can get a kick out of lyrics like “I used to be bummed that I am not number one/until I found out that I am twice as fun”. And some of these rank among TMBG’s finest – “Triops Has Three Eyes” is a jangly, well-written pop tune that deserves repeat listens; “Figure Eight” is an addictive piece of surf-rock, and “813 Mile Car Trip” is a speedy and all-too-brief slice of power pop. It may be kids music, but it’s really well-made kids music – “I Can Add” has a great sense of harmony, full instrumentation, and lots of subtle touches, and even the short tunes like “Nonagon” contain enough ideas to require a few repeat listenings, which is probably what this was set up for. All things considered, it’s still a kids album, and those of us who have passed elementary school might not appreciate the goofy lyrics and kid vocal spots, but it’s apparent that it’s not a cash-in – like Schoolhouse Rock and most of the songs on the Muppets’ album, there’s some real depth to the material.

Here Comes Science (2009)
A fourth kids album, this one aimed at a slightly older crowd (like 3rd-5th grade), covering biology, chemistry, the scientific method, and the universe (it is just me, or are They Might Be Giants attempting to pander specifically to kids born in the year 2000? First they come out with goofy, nursery-rhyme like songs, then teach the kids about the alphabet, then numbers and math, and now more complex topics like science. Is the teen angst album coming out next?) This is really the album you’d think TMBG was made for – even before they ever did kids albums, they had a few educational songs such as “Mammal” and “Why Does the Sun Shine?” (which finally sees a studio rendition here), and an obvious affinity for dorky lyrics. It’s good, but not as good as you’d expect. It’s not disarmingly cute the way the last two kids albums were, and besides maybe “Electric Car” (sung by Goldwasser) there aren’t many standouts. The idea of science-based topics seems to constrict the group a bit as it makes their songs excessively wordy and less clever – they even felt obligated to make an addendum to “Why Does the Sun Shine?” because all the information wasn’t right (“Why Does the Sun Really Shine?”) Basically, it’s taken away the Giants’ ability to use the abstract, which is kinda like asking them to entertain you with one arm tied behind their back. I mean, this band made a name for themselves by being abstract. It's like asking the developers of the next Mario game to adhere to the laws of physics. I’ll give them credit for coming out with a some good vocal hooks despite that – “Cells” is a Beach Boys-inspired tune that basically combines “We Live in a Dump” with “Finished With Lies” (although that itself is basically a rip of “Getting Better”), and Marty Beller’s “Speed and Velocity” is a good example of this sort of thing done right. Like most TMBG albums, its rapid-fire nature helps an awful lot, and it’s hard to deny their talent for this sort of thing – the hooks are just catchy and plentiful enough to make you want to listen again, even if the concept isn’t so amusing (“Solid, Liquid, Gas”, “How Many Planets?”), and again I’m left with the impression that it would be an effective educational tool. I even learned a few things that I did not know before. Musically, it’s fine, using the same grab bag of styles and solid songwriting that got them to this point, although I can’t help notice they cannibalize themselves a bit – isn’t “I’m a Paleontologist” just “The Shadow Government” with different lyrics?

On a side note, am I the only one who finds the album to be a bit more anti-religion than a kid's album should be? The first song mentions that the Big Bang and evolution are real and that angels are only stories, in a way that seems too specific to not be pointed. Plus, there is a song called “My Brother, the Ape”. It’s not that I mind that, or that I think TMBG is really trying to actively push something, but it's surprising that Disney didn't step in and make them change some of the lyrics. You'd think they'd shy away from the word "evolution" and force some lyric changes, especially when they're marketing to parents of very impressionable children. Like, they're the company I would most expect to do something like that. Even Flansburgh was surprised they didn't. Perhaps they're more liberal than we thought?

Join Us (2011)
I've been a fan of this band for many years, so let me say that this is really the first time where I've been excited about a new TMBG album (at least, one intended for adults). Not to say this is drastically better than The Else, but it's sort of a return to their more whimsical, rapid-fire sound, and the result is the most creative album they've released in nearly two decades. Some of it is a little too self-consciously weird (I'm thinking mostly of "Cloisonne", which is basically unclassifiable), but they've also nailed so many of the things they used to do so well. Check out "Let Your Hair Hang Down"; it's straight hook-filled power-pop, with the same sort of brilliant harmonies and memorable lyricisms that earmarked great tunes like "I Should Be Allowed to Think". As on some of the early albums, there are plenty of musical and lyrical puzzles to solve, such as "Spoiler Alert", a narrative told from two different points of view at the same time (which must have been a pain in the ass to mix). I'd say the biggest winner on the album is Linnell's "Lady and the Tiger", which is not only stupidly catchy, but clever enough to re-tell a classic story from a completely different viewpoint, playing off the open-ended nature of the original (my interpretation is that the lady and tiger are still waiting for the reader to decide the ending, but it's pretty open). But "Celebration" and "When Will You Die?" are also big highlights, which toe the line between sincerity and irony well (I assume the latter is about Osama Bin Laden, but like most TMBG songs it probably isn't about anyone).

Really, pretty much everything on here is good, so instead of naming individual tunes, I'll just say a few things about the sound. It's still produced very much like a rock record, albeit one with a lot of gimmickry. So there's still plenty of real drums and a bunch of guitar, but they're capable of switching things up very quickly. In fact, the last five tracks here are all pretty strange, reminding me a lot of the fast-paced hodgepodge of odd concept songs at the end of Flood. One in particular ("Dog Walker") sounds a lot like early Ween, while "You Don't Like Me" and "2082" aren't far from the sillier stuff they've done on their kids' albums. But they still write good rock songs - "Judy is Your Vietnam" and "Canajoharie" respectively show Flans and Linnell still at the top of their game. The result is a tight and balanced 18-track album that can be played on repeat, which I can't say about anything since Apollo 18. This is a good thing because it's the first time since I've been following the band where I can imagine the fans really wanting to hear the new stuff. The only thing lacking here is the presence of a really great single like "Puppet Head" or "Statue". Still, their songwriting muses haven't worked this hard in years. If you're a fan who's been put off by some of the last decade's releases, it's safe to come back now.