Join Us
Wow! What an excellent new sound. Their show at First Ave was hilarious and great. They finally (sort of) explained their bizarre cover of Chumbawamba's Tubthumping - a quite delightful "cross over" of my musical tastes since Chumbawamba (and their brilliant sardonic lovely Anarchist humanist lyrics) have always felt to me like the literal, visceral (slightly manic) version of TMBG's poetic, emotional explorations of loss and disconnection and the meaning of humor. At the same time, TMBG feels "stronger" than Chumba for not being literal about the human experience, and Alice manages to make tragedy almost comical (or even less important) by singing so frequently about it.
Anyway, enough of sneaking into American pop culture by attaching a drinking song to your album about systems of oppression. On to the new TMBG tracks:
I just bought their new rarities track (which includes the Chumabawamba cover) entitled Album Raises New and Troubling Questions before attending the First Ave concert. Thank goodness they keep asking! Their music has been the lifeblood of my creativity for much of my life. I won't review the rarities tracks, but it is an excellently odd collection that stands as a style collection better than Cast Your Pod To The Wind (though the first half of that CD sounds like the whole start of another album).
Join Us is more sophisticated than the other mellow/funky TMBG album Mink Car, with almost a bit of a "World Music" inspiration at the same time that it feels so informed by modern American pop sensibilities. I like the greater variety of the album as well, compared with Mink Car (which personally felt like some kind of revelation that John and John were going to "cave" to the new electronic rhythmic feel of most modern pop while failing to compete with it when scraping together their beautiful tracks from Long Tall Weekend and shoving them into a plastic model that wouldn't fit them).
On the weekend of my birth in January of 1983, They Might Be Giants played their first concert. The new arrangement feels a bit like the schizophrenic but endearing Pink Album (Their first album, just called They Might Be Giants), yet it also feels like an 'update' from the Pink Album; with all the experimentation allowed through random MP3 or Dial-a-Song tunes throughout the years, they struck a balance between their original sound and their "place" in radio-based Rock and Roll. It could be a good "closing" album for the band if they wanted to retire. Yet I feel the next few years from Them will net some truly life-altering pieces whose power They themselves wouldn't even be aware of.
Or perhaps it will just be like a new Lincoln with their Ana Ng hit or a new Flood with a couple songs that really capture peoples' imaginations the way Particle Man and their cover of Istanbul (Not Constantinople) did. Maybe I am thinking too much.
In any case, this present new album features a giant pink hearse monster-truck driving full throttle to the left against our inclination to read left-to-right ... almost as if the truck is driving over an imaginary line of their back catalog, crushing it in some kind of retroactive retraction/retirement of their "learning" years in hopes of replacing it with this "one true" new album.
It's highly appropriate that they are aware of how far they have come and how good they have gotten. It's a They Might Be Giants album that needs no review. (Not just because they're always good.) This one is better than their worst and "uniquer than average". And it's available for purchase (and most likely for downloading for free somewhere but I encourage you not to rob them of this victory almost 30 years in the making). If you buy it, you will be happy. http://www.amazon.com/Join-Us-They-Might-Giants/dp/B00518HATA
I bought it. And I'm happy. Just some unsolicited life advice.
Anyway, enough of sneaking into American pop culture by attaching a drinking song to your album about systems of oppression. On to the new TMBG tracks:
I just bought their new rarities track (which includes the Chumabawamba cover) entitled Album Raises New and Troubling Questions before attending the First Ave concert. Thank goodness they keep asking! Their music has been the lifeblood of my creativity for much of my life. I won't review the rarities tracks, but it is an excellently odd collection that stands as a style collection better than Cast Your Pod To The Wind (though the first half of that CD sounds like the whole start of another album).
Join Us is more sophisticated than the other mellow/funky TMBG album Mink Car, with almost a bit of a "World Music" inspiration at the same time that it feels so informed by modern American pop sensibilities. I like the greater variety of the album as well, compared with Mink Car (which personally felt like some kind of revelation that John and John were going to "cave" to the new electronic rhythmic feel of most modern pop while failing to compete with it when scraping together their beautiful tracks from Long Tall Weekend and shoving them into a plastic model that wouldn't fit them).
On the weekend of my birth in January of 1983, They Might Be Giants played their first concert. The new arrangement feels a bit like the schizophrenic but endearing Pink Album (Their first album, just called They Might Be Giants), yet it also feels like an 'update' from the Pink Album; with all the experimentation allowed through random MP3 or Dial-a-Song tunes throughout the years, they struck a balance between their original sound and their "place" in radio-based Rock and Roll. It could be a good "closing" album for the band if they wanted to retire. Yet I feel the next few years from Them will net some truly life-altering pieces whose power They themselves wouldn't even be aware of.
Or perhaps it will just be like a new Lincoln with their Ana Ng hit or a new Flood with a couple songs that really capture peoples' imaginations the way Particle Man and their cover of Istanbul (Not Constantinople) did. Maybe I am thinking too much.
In any case, this present new album features a giant pink hearse monster-truck driving full throttle to the left against our inclination to read left-to-right ... almost as if the truck is driving over an imaginary line of their back catalog, crushing it in some kind of retroactive retraction/retirement of their "learning" years in hopes of replacing it with this "one true" new album.
It's highly appropriate that they are aware of how far they have come and how good they have gotten. It's a They Might Be Giants album that needs no review. (Not just because they're always good.) This one is better than their worst and "uniquer than average". And it's available for purchase (and most likely for downloading for free somewhere but I encourage you not to rob them of this victory almost 30 years in the making). If you buy it, you will be happy. http://www.amazon.com/Join-Us-They-Might-Giants/dp/B00518HATA
I bought it. And I'm happy. Just some unsolicited life advice.