Gigantic

A new They Might Be Giants album is always a reason to celebrate, and The Else, which came out two weeks ago, has scarcely left my iPod/CD player.

I first discovered They in 1986, when a high school friend of mine bought their debut album (on vinyl), hated it, and gave it to me. I confess, it was about a year before I actually listened to it, and when I did it was only because I was in a friend's car in Syracuse and there was this cool song on the tape deck with the line "All the people are so happy now/They're heads are caving in." I asked what it was, was told it was They Might Be Giants, and realized to my slight embarrassment that I actually owned it. Naturally, when I got back to the apartment, I dug out the record, put it on, and discovered, hey!, I really liked it.

Their second album Lincoln came out in 1988--which I picked up on vinyl, as well--and I thought it a disappointment at the time, but liked a lot on it.

So I have followed Their career eagerly ever since. They were based in Brooklyn, so when I lived in NYC there were many opportunities to see Them live, and They often did free concerts in Central Park or Prospect Park, so I saw Them a half dozen or so times between 1990 and 1996. I last saw Them live in 1998 when They played at the House of Blues in West Hollywood.

They intially started out as just two guys named John--a guitarist and an accordionist/keyboardist/tuba-ist, etc.--who played to a drum machine (an early song was called "Rhythm Section Want Ad"). They also had the ability to absorb, replicate, and mutate a bewildering variety of musical styles, extremely odd instrumentation (friends of mine and I used to si around listening to their records and playing "name that instrument"), and clever, surreal, and downright funny lyrics. One very early song was based on an odd hyphenation one of them discovered on the back of a Bob Dylan album, and thus was born the saga of Mr. Tambo and Urine Man. That's the kind of thing They do.

In 1994, they added an actual backing band, which cut down on the idiosyncrasy a bit, but they have gradually learned how to combine the best aspects of working with an organic, live band and the "musical pop culture in a blender" approach of their earlier material.

My favorite TMBG track? A song called "I Can Hear You," recorded at the Edison Laboratory on an original wax cylinder, and is a litany of modern communications devices (airplane phones, apartment intercoms, fast food drive-through windows, etc.) that sound no better than Edison wax cylinders (it was recorded before thw advent of the cellphone). Absolutely brilliant. It's on 1996's Factory Showroom if you want to find it.

I sort of lost track of Them for a while as they delved into making children's records (which, as it turns out, aren't that far removed from their proper albums).

The Else is their first "real" album since 2004's somewhat disappointing The Spine, but it is a better record. It starts off slow (the first few tracks are a tad dull), but the album gets better as it goes on and gets stranger. "The Shadow Government" marks the beginning of the good stuff, and the convoluted wordplay and odd instrumentation of "Bee of the Bird of the Moth" is classic TMBG. By the time "The Mesopotamians" comes on (with its singalong chorus of "Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh!") you're with them all the way. (These are also the same guys who wrote a song documenting the James K. Polk administration, a celebration of Belgium's famous painter James Ensor ("he lived with his mother and the torments of Christ"), a catchy scientific treatise about mammals, a a botany lesson all about conifers.

Anyway, the best of the new album is the bonus disc of podcasts (a 21st century version of their old Dial-a-Song answering machine service), which contains the weirder (and better) stuff. Highly recommended.