They Might Be Giants- Join Us

While never recording an outright bad album, They Might Be Giants have had a spotty track record over the past decade and a half. Starting with 1996's Factory Showroom, the band relied more on kitsch and sometimes-too-clever concepts for their songs while the sense of professionalism which now wafted from their music seemed more slick than enjoyable. The weirdness and creativity of the band's lyrics and songwriting were in a slump, and so they began to use their full band, utilizing horn sections and guitar solos all over the place, as a crutch to make up the difference, leading to music that—while, again, not terrible—was wildly uneven. I always think of these albums as overlong even though they're just as long, in terms of the number of songs and playtime, as any of the older ones. Really it was a combination of the above factors and poor pacing/sequencing which had done them in and made these records seem like endurance tests. After all, They Might Be Giants will never revolutionize their sound, so it's all about creativity and novelty within the content, not the form.

Join Us is the band's first album since spending the past four years recording children's music, and I have to wonder if this got them back to their roots, when they were 20-somethings making songs with surreal/psychedelic concepts like 'Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head' and 'Purple Toupee.' Indeed, there are songs and moments here that could have easily been done with just the two John's and some cheap equipment: 'Cloisonne' has a linear story to tell, complete with genuinely funny affected voices, cheap sounding drum machines, and simple keyboard chords. One of Join Us's highlights, 'Protagonist', is similarly simple, with half-joking hand claps and backing vocals, all the while recalling the genre flourishes of Flood. The synth-pop of 'The Lady And The Tiger', meanwhile, is straight out of the production of the band's first two albums, as are '2082' and 'Three Might Be Duende', the latter of which has a wonderful strut to it, sounding like a mix between a march and a dance number from...oh I don't know, Robin Hood: Men In Tights.

By and large, however, Join Us feels like it welds their earlier, more creative and bizarre songwriting to the more muscular and expansive full-band sound of their mid-90s-to-present day era. This means that the album suffers from some of the same problems that the last few have, insofar as the lyrics and melodies might be good but the music sometimes sounds samey and oddly faceless. Never fear, though, it's not all about mining the past or repeating mistakes. 'Spoiler Alert' is this record's greatest attempt at breaking new ground, one of the few times you'll hear both Johns singing together throughout a song, trading lines back and forth. Furthermore, I think I might've once referred to Ween as the R-rated counterpart to Weird Al and They Might Be Giants, and I have to wonder if I was on to something after hearing 'Dog Walker', which lifts that band's patented helium-vocals and self-aware hard rock swagger.

If only they had moved away from their full band sound some more, Join Us might've given their best records a run for the money. However at a certain point, horn breakdowns and guitar solos lose their luster, especially when they're used incessantly. They Might Be Giants aren't suffering from it as much as they used to, but I still wish they'd try more new ideas instead of relying so heavily on their band's chops and energy to patch up a lack of ideas. Keep in mind, I'm a huge fan of John Henry (and the re-arrangements done for the live tracks on the underrated Severe Tire Damage are also brilliant) but in those situations the full band were used sparingly to great effect.

Join Us is the band's strongest album in years if only because they spend most of it either mining their most beloved era or trying new things. Unfortunately they didn't go far enough in either direction to completely hook me. Join Us is an almost-excellent record, showing that the band can still summon the old magic, and pull off some new tricks, when they aren't hiding behind their band. It just isn't quite the full comeback I had hoped for and tried to convince myself it was going to be.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

They Might Be Giants- Flood

We sometimes come to music via strange pathways, don't we? Perhaps an older sister introduces you to the Beatles via a mixtape she made for a family road trip when you were 8. Perhaps a car commercial with a rather lovely and melancholic song revealed Nick Drake to you. Perhaps, too, like many who are around my age you came to the music of They Might Be Giants via the children's cartoon Tiny Toon Adventures. It's sad that I was unaware for years that the animated videos for 'Istanbul (Not Constantinople)' and 'Particle Man' weren't just oddly catchy jingles thrown together by the animators of the show. I eventually borrowed John Henry from my local library because I remembered the band's unique name... an album which, it turned out, didn't have those songs on it. Maybe they weren't the band I was thinking of? Rest assured that years later, thanks to the magic of the Internet and the way people catalogue every minute detail of everything ever, I eventually found myself at the end of another strange pathway and Flood was waiting.

You may have done some Internet research about this album, too. Metacritic will do you no good, I'm afraid. And while you could check out Flood on Wikipedia, you'd soon be confused by the mixed-to-negative reviews listed on its entry despite the text stating it is a fan favorite. This is because:
A) It's hard to track down a broad sampling of reviews from 1990
B) Most professional music critics for big magazines, especially around that time, are/were a bunch of idiots with weirdly narrow tastes
C) Allmusic.com has some decent writing, but it's mostly filled with iconoclasts who underrate some of the best records of all time, not to mention they frequently praise or dismiss albums with pithy insouciance. See their review of Factory Showroom for a particularly egregious example.

Enough grousing. Let me go ahead and say that Flood is as perfect and as perfectly realized an album as has ever been recorded. The surrealism and strangeness of the first two They Might Be Giants records were tempered a bit, bringing the band's imagination and songwriting skills to their closest coupling. Beginning with one of the band's patented self-referential tunes in the literally introductory track, 'Theme From Flood', They Might Be Giants whip through a strange parade of tunes, ideas, characters, and philosophies, from a nightlight's advice/ode to its owner ('Birdhouse In Your Soul'), an oblique commentary on colonization (or anyway, that's what I think 'Women & Men' is about), a short cowboy ditty wherein someone bellows “minimum wage!” before a whip cracks, and, uhm, whatever the circular song structure of the brilliant piano duet 'Dead' is about (groceries and mortality?). To say that Flood is perfect may seem a tad hyperbolic, however, considering that there is absolutely nothing I would add or remove to make this record better, I think it's a fair claim. Even Flood's lesser songs, the uncharacteristically preachy 'Racist Friend' and the 60s organ-led, lovelorn bitterness of 'Twisting', contribute to the overall flow and feel of the album, especially considering the songs which precede and follow them.

Indeed, Flood was the beginning of the era which saw They Might Be Giants moving away from the almost abrasive weirdness and absurdity of their first two albums into more quirky and cerebral material, not to mention employing a full band in studio and on stage, much to the chagrin of some fans. Yet that doesn't make it the sort of transitional, unsure record which one might expect. It's telling that the band have sometimes performed the album in its entirety as a self-styled cover band, dubbed Sapphire Bullets. Such an act demonstrates a real sureness and awareness on the band's part of the love people have for this music and it's unique to see a group play to that. One might even consider it a precursor to the way the All Tomorrow's Parties festivals led to the Don't Look Back concerts, in which bands perform their 'classic' albums.

But I digress. I hesitate to make claims about definitiveness when it comes to music, but you could hardly do better than Flood if you only want or need one album from They Might Be Giants. As either an introductory tour of their odd (and oddly catchy) art-pop world or your only visit down this strange pathway, Flood is as good as it gets.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Album of the Week: They Might Be Giants- John Henry

Radiohead's OK Computer was the album that really got me into the idea of appreciating music as a serious art form, searching for new and interesting sounds and styles, but it was John Henry by They Might Be Giants which originally showed me a world beyond that of the pop music, hip hop, and post-grunge/alternative rock that dominated the radio in the early 90s. Truth be told I only borrowed it from the library because I was trying to find the songs that the children's show Tiny Toon Adventures made into music videos in one episode. It turned out they weren't on John Henry (they were from Flood), but it didn't matter. It blew my fragile little mind that people could write songs about dirt bikes and obscure painters; unlike Weird Al, it wasn't case of someone taking other songs and substituting funny/clever words it. Yeah, these songs weren't totally serious, either, but They Might Be Giants wrote their own tunes. The word play and odd point of view of They Might Be Giants was every bit a formative experience as similarly youthful/odd things like the TV show The Adventures Of Pete & Pete and Weird Al. All of those are surreal, bizarre, intelligent, and have a unique worldview that is very different from the rest of the culture at large. If people are the products of what they 'consume' then I can thank/blame John Henry, Pete & Pete, and Weird Al as much as anything else in my life for the mentality and personality I have.

John Henry seems to be a controversial point in this band's discography. Let's pause and consider what it means for the controversial moment of a band's career to be when they add a full 'rock' band and rely less on accordions and violins. Hmmmm. OK. Perhaps if I was familiar with the entire discography of They Might Be Giants or John Henry wasn't the first thing of their's I had heard, I might be a bit upset at the professional rock band backing the two Johns on this one. But as it is, I feel like the arrangements and "new" instruments add to the music rather than detract. 'AKA Driver' wouldn't have the same punch without the guitar solo. Certainly 'Stompbox'--an ode to guitar effects pedals, I think--would be a bit sillier than it already is. John Henry isn't monochromatically 'rock' though. The band just as often sound almost ska like with horn sections as they do 'rock' with guitar solos, not to mention that subtle but excellent use of organ.

What makes this album so brilliant isn't about the music. It is ultimately the magic gift that They Might Be Giants have for writing addictive pop songs that evoke so many images and ideas, twisting words and phrases into fascinating new shapes. On paper, 'I Should Be Allowed To Think' is a childishly stupid concept: a song about how the titular character isn't allowed to think but should be, subsequently lamenting such things as "I should be allowed to glue my poster" and, after quoting the "I saw the best minds of my generation..." line by Ginsberg, re-working it into "I saw the worst bands of my generation applied by magic marker to dry wall." Listen to this album in your formative years, as I did, and their lyrics and music seem odd and oddly funny--'O, Do Not Forsake Me' was a personal favorite--but some of it becomes, well, oddly profound as much as it is oddly funny when you're older. 'No One Knows My Plan' seems to be about a prisoner planning an escape but manages a reference to the famous philosophical 'allegory of the cave.' And after all these years I finally noticed that 'Dirt Bike' refers to a literal dirt bike but also uses 'dirt bike' as a name for other things, including a band and a fearsome group of bandits. I think...

Flood is the They Might Be Giants album that will live forever but I've got to go with my gut. There are songs on Flood that I like a lot more than the songs on John Henry, but John Henry means more to me and is more consistent. I always end up skipping songs on Flood but I listen all the way through John Henry. It takes something special for an album that's 20 tracks and almost an hour long to keep me in the audience all the way through. Flood is an attractive woman that everyone likes; John Henry is a real, flawed woman who I personally hold dear and adore. I'm not sure what that says about the 10 year old version of me who also loved John Henry but I feel like They Might Be Giants have probably written a song about how the 10 year old version of someone and an adult version of them are both in love with the same woman, so everything is peachy.

Album of the Week: Ween- The Mollusk

If you were a young nerd in the late 80s and early 90s, you probably really liked Weird Al and They Might Be Giants, bands that were themselves nerdy but incredibly intelligent and with a keen ear for pop music (or in Weird Al's case, a keen sense of turning pop music into something that was clever and/or funny). They had a knack for reproducing various genres of music and their humor bordered the lines between PG and PG-13 while often having obscure references you didn't get until years later--I remember hearing They Might Be Giants's 'Meet James Ensor' and assuming he was some character they made up, like 'Mean Mr. Mustard' by the Beatles.

Well, Ween are kind of like the band you get into when you're old enough to think about and experiment with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. You never outgrow They Might Be Giants or Weird Al, but they also belong to a younger version of you in many ways. But Ween, now here's an older version of what you had. They're equally witty and equally adept at covering musical genres and writing brilliant pop songs. But Ween are like the R rated version of the above bands, juvenile while at the same time very adult in nature. Ween tow the line between absurdity and sincerity so often you're never sure if a song like 'It's Gonna Be (Alright)' is for real or not. And while they wrote about adult things like sex or drugs, they wrote about them in a decidedly immature way.

The Mollusk is Ween's answer to questions about sincerity vs. parody and originality vs. genre pastiches. Yes, it's a vague concept album about nautical things; yes, it has a song called 'Waving My Dick In The Wind; yes, it borrows heavily from psychedelia, art rock, and prog rock. But no it's not a joke; it is a masterpiece.

The reason Ween can pull of this album is that they are utterly committed to the music they make even if some of it is just a joke to them. You don't record music you hate to make fun of it. Ween may be goofy and immature at times, but they are serious about their love for music. Album opener 'I'm Dancing In The Show Tonight' is a goofy musical number complete with silly voices and a spot-on piano melody. The title track is a transcendent ode to the creature itself, complete with a cheap synthesizer chorus of flutes and brass. 'I'll Be Your Jonny On The Spot' combines a superfast drum machine with crunchy guitars and deadpan vocal delivery. Then there's 'The Blarney Stone', a Scottish bar sing-along with appropriate ambient/crowd sounds. And the instrumental 'Pink Eye (On My Leg)', with its cheesy and cheap sounding drum loop...and dog barks...and what sounds like a guy burping or saying "uhhhhh" slowed down. Of course I would be remiss if I didn't bring up 'Ocean Man', which is so pleasant and catchy that it was used in the Spongebob Squarepants movie.

And so we come full circle: Ween, a band who can write about very R-rated things (one of their classics is a track called 'L.M.L.Y.P.';you might be able to guess what that stands for) but still retain a child-like whimsy. Even when Ween are spinning a style of music or some genre to their own means--sincerely or otherwise--you never doubt their love of music and their way with both songwriting and instrumental chops. Anybody can write lazy, simple joke songs but it takes a truly skilled band to pull off 'Buckingham Green', which is like a trip from Syd Barret-style mid 60s psychedelia to early 70s prog rock and back.

While the rest of their albums might be funnier, weirder, more interesting, more profane, more populist, or more varied, The Mollusk simply and neatly demonstrates everything that makes Ween such a great band. You might wish they took things more seriously. You might wish they took things less seriously. But you could hardly wish for a better and more consistent album from them.