The Else

They Might Be Giants released their new album The Else today, iTunes only, 2 months before the CD comes out. (Though the CD is actually going to be 2 CDs, apparently.) I'd just as soon have had them selling DRM-free mp3s on theymightbegiants.com, but I bought it off iTunes anyway. It's a good album, though like most of their recent albums, I have a hard time getting fully behind it because it divides so sharply down the Flansburgh | Linnell line. Their earlier stuff was more homogeneous, I think, and it was easy to like entire albums. Nowadays, I usually feel like more of a Linnell fan than a TMBG fan. (E.g. when the heck is he going to write more State Songs?)

That said, I will give Flansburgh credit for With the Dark. I really like how the several parts are so different and yet still flow well into each other. Some pieces of it do sound "typically Flansy," but the track as a whole is made more interesting than that by the combination and juxtapositions. The instrumental part is pretty neat, and for some reason the one bit about taxidermy cracks me up. So anyway, good job there, Flans.

Contrecoup was the only song on here that I'd heard before, and I was looking forward to it. Unfortunately, I don't think it fits well with the rest of the album, due mostly to the instrumentation, I think. The simple acoustic guitar works well in the context of making up a song as a challenge on a radio show, but less so in the midst of their other stuff. So it lost a bit by that, even though they actually extended the song somewhat. I'm also not fond of the changed rhyme scheme at the end. They took an AABC (where the B had an internal rhyme) and made it an ABBC which makes the first B sound wrong (especially since my mind is pre-filling in something that actually does rhyme). Urgh. The gradual speeding up at the end was kind of cute though, even if it didn't go anywhere but to a fadeout.

Others I liked include Bee of the Bird of the Moth which is based on a nifty critter called the Hummingbird Hawk-Moth. The word play here is fun, with the equal / freak-we'll rhyme, and the line with head lice, heads lie and headlights. I like the dramatic beginning to the melody in Climbing the Walls, though it ironically sounds more like coming down from the walls than climbing them. While I love the chorus of Withered Hope, I need to work on liking the rest of it more so it doesn't feel lopsided. The Mesopotamians is fun just to get to sing "Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh."

Anyway, I'll probably listen to the whole album as a unit a few more times, to let things settle in more before I send it all into the usual TMBG division of tracks I listen to and those I don't.

They Might Be Podcasting

Okay yeah, that was the obvious title for this post. Whatever. Anyway, I haven't really gotten into the whole podcasting thing much, but I have been listening to the one from They Might Be Giants and it's been a lot of fun. Check it out. Plenty of it I've heard before, though some of it is new versions of old songs. But I really enjoy all the brand new songs they're sharing there. Miniature Sidewalk Whirlwind for starters was great, and It Never Fails, with that double-Flansburgh stuff going on, was a kick. In the latest one, I really like Diving Board, about the relationship between a swimming pool and its diving board. The made-up language lesson was pretty funny, too. Lots of good stuff.

Use It or Lose It

Last week on a radio show called The Next Big Thing Erin McKean, "activist lexicographer," presented John Linnell (of TMBG) with an assignment. She gave him three words that she thought were in danger of dying out and being removed from the dictionary, and requested that he write a song using them. The words were contrecoup, craniosophic and limerent. On the latest show, Linnell came back with the song. I think it's just incredibly cool that he does things like that, and I even enjoyed the song.

you know what's wrong with me
you know phrenology
you saw my injury
you can tell just by looking at my skull

contrecoup on the rebound
contrecoup hurt me again
and the second was worse by far than the first
'cause it made me limerent

when my head was hit
I bounced away from it
or as someone who is craniosophic would say
the brain went the opposite way

contrecoup on the rebound
contrecoup hurt me again
and the second was worse by far than the first
cause the first just left me feeling inert
but the contrecoup woke my feelings for you
and it left me limerent

You probably have to hear it, though. Listen to the segment of the show where he sings it here. The original assignment of the task is here. (RealAudio links, about 6 minutes long.)

Update: Thanks to Aliste, you can now get this as an mp3 (2.2 MB). I also corrected "unnerved" to "inert."

TMBG Blog Mention

They Might Be Giants now have an album of Venue Songs available for download. On their last tour, they wrote a new song for every place they played. Great album. And I was tickled to find the following in the Towson, Maryland song:

As you navigate the rotary on the way to park your car by the theater,
I'll hold your sweater, my leg is in a bear trap, I'm unable to attend,
But I applaud you and I'll jealously read your blog after the show.

Cool :-) Blogs are good for that sort of thing. I wonder how many people at that show caught the reference and ran home to blog it afterwards.

TMBG at the Catalyst

I got to see They Might Be Giants at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz last night. It was actually the first live show of theirs I've been to. Generally, that's not my sort of scene, getting packed like sardines into a nightclub and having to wear ear plugs (yes, I brought ear plugs, and I'm very glad I did). But it was definitely fun to get to see TMBG perform, so it was all worth it.

A guy called Corn Mo did the opening act, and he was pretty amusing. For one guy with one accordion (and one stick strapped to his foot for whacking a cymbal) he really had a heck of a sound. He came out again later in the show to do an accordion duet with Linnell on Particle Man (here's a video of it from another show).

I managed to have a really good spot, about 10 feet from the stage, Linnell-side. That's a good side to be, I think, given the difference between Linnell and Flansburgh. Flans is the showman, he sings to the crowd. You can watch him from anywhere. Linnell sings to you. Plus, I'm just more of a Linnell fan anyway. Oh, and it was a decent vantage point for some (kinda blurry) pictures.

One of my favorite songs from the evening was Doctor Worm. I really liked the arrangement they did for it, with the shifted voice/rhythm offset thing near the end. Plus, they let off the confetti cannons at the end of the "Rabbi Vole" solo, which was a perfect place for them, especially since most people probably expected them to be saved for James K. Polk.

A fairly new, unreleased (and unrehearsed) song they did was called Fake Believe. They said it's one they're working on for their next children's project. It was kind of a fun song, though like most of their stuff, I'd need to hear it a couple more times to get a better sense of it. They weren't sure if they were going to be including it on the live shows download page or not, but I hope they do. (By the way, they're making recordings of every show on this tour available for mp3 download, $10/show. I think that's very cool.) And speaking of new songs, they also sang one they wrote especially for the Catalyst show. That's just another reason I think these guys are awesome -- they're writing a song for every single venue they play at on this tour. They're not all going to be great songs, of course, but I think it's wonderful that they're doing it.

A funny comment that I liked: For Stalk of Wheat, Dan Miller got out the Flexitone, which has a small, red ball or circle or something on it. One of the Johns said something about it adding some red into the scene, to go with Flans' maracas, I think. Flans pointed out, though, that it was only a very small amount, sort of a "homeopathic dose of red," at which there was a fair amount of laughter from the crowd. Then Linnell pointed out that they "really couldn't make that kind of a joke in New York -- no one would get it." Yay for us hippie Californians.

So anyway, it was a good show. Lots of fun all around.

The Spine Surfs Alone

Now that I've had The Spine Surfs Alone EP for a little while and listened to it a fair amount I think I can say a few things about it. The title track was the kind of song that my brain doesn't really hear the first few times through. I like it rather more now, though, especially the way Flansburgh's voice morphs into the guitar parts.

Unquestionably, my favorite song on this album is Now is Strange. Linnell's vocal gyrations took a bit of getting used to at first, but hey, it's supposed to be strange after all, right? I think that the extremes to which he twists his voice add a very immediate, visceral feel to the song; I feel myself pulled into it much more than if he sang it straight. When he sings the word "unbelievable" in particular, I can practically feel the shape of it in my own mouth. It's wonderful.

I'm All You Can Think About is suitably obsessive with its constantly rising melody and bass lines. To me that seems like an interesting tie-in with the last verse of I Can't Hide From My Mind, at the end of The Spine, but in a greatly intensified way. The bridge that switches into the relative major is somewhat of a relief, like finally taking a full breath of air when you hadn't even realized you'd been holding your breath. But that relief just accentuates the intensity of the rest of the song, more so than if it had been absent.

Fun Assassin seems to fill a similar role for the EP as a whole, since it's the only major-key song on an otherwise very dark album. It's a big contrast to the following Skullivan, which I still think is just weird. The Other Side of the World is a tiny little instrumental that mostly makes sense because of the two songs it connects.

Canada Haunts Me is a good end to the EP, I think. It's another match for I Can't Hide From My Mind, and I like how each song ends its respective album with something a little quieter and more introspective. What I love about Canada Haunts Me is how perfectly they nailed the instrumentation and arrangment. It is not only haunting but evokes a feeling of wind whistling over huge expanses of barren tundra. Very nice.

Spineful

I finally got my copies of The Spine and The Spine Surfs Alone today. I actually managed to borrow some mp3s of The Spine over the weekend, so I've been able to listen to that while I waited for the actual CDs to arrive. Thus, I have various things to say about it, now that it's had a chance to sink in a bit. I nearly always need a little time with new TMBG songs to determine what I really think about them, and even then it can change considerably over time. That's half the fun, of course.

Museum of Idiots, though, was one song that I liked right away, even from the original Dial-a-Song version, so I was very happy that it made it onto this album. It's a waltz! Plus, the instrumental bits have a few parts with accents on the 1's and the 5's, which would make for some interesting pivots. (Regular pivots on 1 and 3, then accelerate a little bit on last pivot, count 5.) I don't generally like to pick absolute favorites, even just from a single album, but this song is definitely up there.

I've seen a lot of comments on how well the tracks are arranged and flow together across the whole album. There are lots of obvious things, like the Spine -> Memo to Human Resources segue, or the Au Contraire -> Damn Good Times connection. And overall it is very nicely put together. But I particularly like the unit of three songs that round off the end of the album. They're all in F, which groups them a little bit, but the sequence is interesting as well.

This sequence starts with Broke in Two, which is another of my favorites, though I didn't notice it until the second time I heard it. I particularly like Linnell's voice on it, and the guitar part. The ending is interesting because it suddenly goes all garbled, like a faulty record, then zips its way up to a high pitch and pops into nothingness. By itself, that's kind of a neat ending, but the great thing about it is that the next song is Stalk of Wheat. So I get the feeling that, by the end of Broke in Two, something really did snap. The tension built until the narrator just couldn't take it anymore, and decided to just go mad and have done with it. So Stalk of Wheat is all about being out of luck and broke and miserable, but it's still a delightfully silly little song. I especially like all the lines with connecting words, linking rhymes and alliterations.

Then at the end, there's I Can't Hide From My Mind, which is rather on the darker side of being crazy, pitting himself against his own mind, and is a nice musical complement to the previous two. What really does it for me in this song are the chord progressions which have some gorgeous flat sixths. For instance, the Db in the progression: (C) F Bb Db / C F Bb C. You've got to hear it in context to fully get it, though. The Db lands on an F in the melody so you'd have expected an F chord there. Great effect. And then the second chorus leading into the bridge is pretty neat, too. The final F chord slides down to an E (mimicking the Db to C transition from before) which leads you to A for the bridge. But then A goes to F, which goes to Db, spelling out an augmented chord. That's nice both for how it ties in with the augmented fifths (= flat sixths) and for all the slithery voice leading you can do with the progression. (Each transition there keeps one note the same and moves the others by a half-step each.) So this was the song that made the music geek in me happy.

A few other random comments on various songs, before I finish up. I've heard some good things about It's Kickin' In but that one hasn't quite kicked in for me yet. Still, I do like how the lyrics sheet actually says "(fake words)" where they're just making noises. Memo to Human Resources has another one of those flat sixths, though it works a bit differently there. Experimental Film is still a fun song, but not as absorbing as it was for me at first. Maybe because I got my fill of it for a while before the album was out, and now other earworms are taking its place. Wearing a Raincoat is one I'm going to have to be with for a while longer before I start grokking it.

Now that I have the actual physical CD, of course, I'm also noticing the liner notes. Someone actually did an awesome job designing this. But that will probably be a topic for another post. Likewise, I'll need a few more listens to The Spine Surfs Alone before I can say anything worthwhile about it.

Spineless

They Might Be Giants' new album The Spine came out today, along with The Spine Surfs Alone EP. I'm feeling kind of silly because I pre-ordered the CDs a little while ago, not knowing that I would be able to buy and download everything cheaper and faster than waiting for the CDs to arrive. Aargh. In the meantime, though, I'm listening almost continually to the first track, Experimental Film (from a RealAudio file here), which is one doozy of a good earworm. The Homestarrunner folks made a music video of it, too, which is kind of amusing. Check it out.

A Very Good Painter

I watched Gigantic recently, a documentary about They Might Be Giants. One of my favorite parts was a short clip of an interview with a guy who just couldn't understand why they had written Meet James Ensor. He said he had questioned the Johns repeatedly about why they would bother writing such an odd song about an obscure Belgian painter, but the only response he could get out of them was "No, really! He's a great painter!" I found that highly amusing, especially since I thought the guy was getting way too worked up about it. For some reason, he just couldn't understand how that would be a legitimate song topic.

One of the things I really like about TMBG (and I think a lot of their fans agree) is the variety of things they write songs about. Belgian artists, ants, tiny doctors, stopped clocks, blue canary night-lights, whatever. I think it's delightful. Makes me wonder, though, what that guy thinks songs "should" be about. If you can't write about whatever inspires or interests you, then what's the point?

Not For Kids Only

After Camp Harmony I went and ordered all three of Bob Reid's CDs. Marz Barz and Abracadab came pretty quickly, but We Are the Children was back-ordered, so I only just got it. Good stuff. This is really how children's music ought to be. He's got fun songs and silly songs, and songs that convey really good messages for kids, without being overly preachy. And it's all really good music, with a great selection of other musicians. He also has elementary school kids sing on a lot of his songs, both solos and entire classes at once. I would have thought that would get old pretty quick, but it actually works really well. The entire third album is sung by kids.

The best things about Bob's music is that, while it is clearly written for kids, adults can still enjoy it immensely. I look forward to his Kid's Concert at Harmony every year, as do the teenagers who grew up on his songs, and the parents who take their younger kids to hear him. Part of it is the fun and happiness he puts into everything, and part of it is also just that it's wonderful to watch kids get happy and excited about music the way they do with him. I would tell anyone with kids to get his CDs.

Along the same line of "real" music for kids, I recently discovered another album while looking up various recordings of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman. It turns out they have an album called Not For Kids Only, with amusing songs for kids, plus some awesome playing by a great duo. I was especially interested to hear Three Men Went A-Hunting, since I remember singing that with Mom when Lacey and I were little.

And of course, we've got to work in They Might Be Giants as well. Their album No! is for kids, and they even have a book that goes with some of the songs. Again, the great thing here is that they don't compromise on musical quality just because they're aiming at kids. If you like their other stuff, you'll like this. Four of Two, for example, is one of my favorite of their songs (though admittedly, I tend to have lots of favorites).

TMBG also sing Why Does the Sun Shine? which is one of many science songs by Tom Glazer and Dottie Evans (thanks to a Rose-Colored Gloss for that link). Some of these can be considerably more on the corny side, but they're still pretty amusing in their own way. It's also interesting to compare the original version of Why Does the Sun Shine? with TMBG's on Severe Tire Damage, just to see the range of effects you can get from the one song.

I like music that makes it easy to be a kid at heart.

They Might Be Whistling a Tuvan Polka

So I've been listening to a lot of They Might Be Giants recently, mostly thanks to Miriam, who has supplied me with just piles of the stuff. They've got a lot of interesting songs, but I find them highly variable. The ones I like, I've been listening to repeatedly for the last week or so, but I don't really give a second thought to the others. Oh well. That's the beauty of making mp3 playlists out of them.

At Friday Night Waltz last night, Joan played "Lucky Ball & Chain," which is a great polka (though I think it's a bit slow for its energy). I've danced to it before, but not for a little while, and I felt like I knew it better than I used to, for all the TMBG that's been going through my head, and that made it even more fun to dance to. I found myself matching parts of the music that I didn't even consciously know were coming up (like the extra measure that's tucked away in the middle somewhere). That was cool.

"Whistling in the Dark" is another one that been a real earworm for me lately. I haven't even figured out why exactly I like it so much, but something about it makes it really addictive. Then last night I was driving home and for some reason started making a Tuvan throat singing arrangement of it in my head. I've still been listening to what Tuvan stuff I can find, and trying to do it myself, and this seemed like an interesting place for it to collide with TMBG. John Linnell in the studio version of "Whistling in the Dark" sings the verses very low, so I started imagining that in kargyraa, which is the really low, growling sort of Tuvan throat singing, that I can't do yet. And then the instrumental breaks (or the simpler parts at least) could be done in sygyt, which is the drone-with-whistling-overtone that I've been working on. Anyway, overall it would probably come out pretty weird, but I was amusing myself.