No, seriously. Basically every album of theirs since Mink Car (2001) has been a postscript – cynics could argue: a series of exponentially pared epitaphs – that has tempered the whimsy of the band’s preceding masterpieces, that has focused the inimitable glee of Factory Showroom or the unbridled creativity of Flood, or has mutated Apollo 18 into, retrospectively, a list of singles. The Else, John Flansburgh and John Linnell’s twelfth LP as a duo (over twenty-five years and still together means silver wrapping paper!), is sensibly and similarly harangued into pop precision.
With the Dust Brothers freckling an otherwise melodramatic “Upside Down Frown” or scissoring up sound bytes between the deliberate cracks of “Withered Hope,” the two Johns can skirt a familiar seam between obligation and wryness. With firm tour band and studio support allowing noxious walls of sound to seem believable on “The Mesopotamians” or “I’m Impressed,” the elder statesmen darlings can relive, congealed, their back catalog of post-punk, sampling, Europop, and pigfuck-lite.
Then again, They Might Be Giants have conquered every imaginable aspect of pop media and they’ve earned the right, plus the capital, to do exactly what they want. Which means an unassuming ditty like “Climbing the Walls” maintains Giants staples like unadorned lyrics tackling mundanity or a whole song bent on the success of an almost-harmony, but it breathes confidence in each sly enjambment and the power chorus is simply irresistible. Maybe that seems cheap, and ostensibly The Else is, but no other band has practiced being cheap so rewardingly.
Copyrights
Dom Sinacola. They Might Be Giants. Copyright 2007 Venus Zine.
