They Might Be Giants - C/D, S/D, OPO etc

I'm conflicted about "Shoehorn with Teeth": either it's meaningless and infuriating or it's wonderfully oblique. I can't make up my mind.

Wonder if anyone's heard their newer records? The Else was surprisingly good. Very straightforward but just a good rock record. I actually kind of enjoy the kids stuff. I'm a dork.

I mostly bumped this to say that "Narrow Your Eyes" may be their best song ever. The lyrics on that one kill me - "I get off the bus/ride past our stop/and though I'm late/I can't get off/I just can't bear/to tell you some lies/so narrow your eyes" **shudder**

i've heard most of their later albums and while there are definitely some good songs here and there, the children's albums are by and large better than the 'regular' albums. also the bonus disc for The Else is more fun than the proper album.

but yeah "Narrow Your Eyes" is great, they can kill you with occasional sincere moments.

I'm a dork.

also this sentence is just kind of assumed when you're posting on a TMBG thread, no need to type it

Yeah I was surprised by the amount of effort they put into those kids albums. They remind me of the earlier stuff but with somewhat dumber lyrics. I don't know if they're better than The Else but some of it is very good. "Can You Find It?" and "C is For Conifers" are just oddly touching, I guess

the kids stuff is fun. for the most part, not all that diff (musically at least) from their regular stuff. and kids do indeed love it.

the bonus disc for The Else is more fun than the proper album

Oh, fer sher! "Why the Christ, why the Devil, Why did you grow a beard?!?"

Of the later stuff, "Mink Car" is brilliant but "The Spine" is their absolute nadir, just completely unredeemable.

Oh, and Tyler I wanna party with you, always find you on my fave threads. :-)

Really really liked "Brain Problem Situation", "We Live in a Dump", "Yeah, the Deranged Millionaire" and "Cast Your Pod to the Wind". I don't think it's better than the main disc but it's a great bonus. TMBG were really a band built for these types of podcasts.

Agree that "The Spine" is the worst. I mean it is fairly decent in spots but I really hate how every song on the first half sounds like every other song on the first half. I really liked "Broke in Two"

haaa right back atcha, gerald. and i agree about the spine -- i remember listening to that a bunch and deciding it really was *bad*. or just completely lifeless.

So these guys are releasing a new album this year and will be touring the US in September. Which is when I was thinking of visiting. They've already announced a few cities and SF and ATL are among them so now I am really really wondering I cant only get over but get to see the beloves Johns live again woo!

Here was my review:

"John Flansburgh, attempting to describe why "Sensurround" was left off of Factory Showroom: "For me, I think of every song as its own thing. I think it's interesting to see the shape of an album after it's put together; you can create a different listening experience depending on how you stack up the songs. The most discipline that we ever apply to an album sequence is avoiding like-sounding songs. If we have too many mid-tempo songs, we'll leave a couple of them off. Or if we have a better example of a song than another, we tend to leave the second-rate one off." Ignoring the fact that I find “Sensurround” to be perhaps the best song of the Factory Showroom era, I really do like the sentiment behind this statement. So it's a little disappointing to find them pretty much ignoring their old values - here comes The Spine, a disc that fills nearly the entire first half with mid-tempo rockers, of which only “Experimental Film” makes an impression. No, none of these songs are bad in isolation, but stacked one after another gives the album a really bland feel, completely atypical of what we’ve come to expect from these guys. The experimentation is toned down – there’s auto-tune on “Bastard Wants to Hit Me”, and one song that’s reminiscent of Flood but only about half as catchy (“Stalk of Wheat”). Other than that, they’ve almost fully transformed into your typical rock band, although the lyrical puzzles are still abound – Linnell sings about resignation from life (“Memo to Human Resources”), drug addiction (“Thunderbird”), and bizarre strings of cause-and-effect relationships (“Wearing a Raincoat”). The unfortunate thing is that the lyrics are the really the only interesting parts of them. I’m not exactly sure what happened here – maybe they purposely decided to write a more “adult” album to offset the kids’ one – but this group never really did the “mature adult rock” thing in the first place. The saving grace of the album is that side 2 has a few legitimately great tracks - “Museum of Idiots” gets by on a strong and punchy horn section, “Damn Good Times” is an energetic slice of power-pop with an accelerating guitar solo ending, and “Broke In Two” rides a wonky guitar line into the stratospheres of catchiness that this group was always capable of. But other than those tracks (and “Experimental Film”), there’s little on here you’ll want to hear again. So give it credit for those few great songs and making an album that’s at least listenable all the way through, but you know the band can do better than this. It's funny to hear them sing on "Stalk of Wheat" that they're "out of ideas", but less funny when it actually seems true."

I stil havent got round to hearing some recent albums. I love "Sensurround", its a great song.

i've heard most of their later albums and while there are definitely some good songs here and there, the children's albums are by and large better than the 'regular' albums.

"The Spine" is their absolute nadir,

agree with all this

i covered "narrow your eyes" for a fan-assembled TMBG tribute album when i was like 16

At parties some of us have been known to break out into spontaneous acapella barbershop renditions of "Kiss me, son of god".

...I have really nerdy friends :(

Weird, I really like The Spine but could never penetrate The Else. Kids' albums, meh – most of what I've heard annoys the hell out of me, but then I don't have kids so

xp awesome, that song entirely lends itself to spontaneous a cappella barbershop renditions

I was so glad that when I saw them live, it was an unplanned, last-minute second show where they decided on spec to do the whole "Flood" album end to end. This was really before all the "dont look back" trend, as well.

Seeing them do "Fingertips" live was a spinout.

I've seen them three times..."Fingertips" is indeed pretty awesome live

If you can see them at a traditional rock venue (as opposed to something more "family friendly") it's way worth it. Flansburgh has a pretty wicked sense of humor.

Yeah this was a rock show - for "Man its so loud in here" they dropped all the stage lights and lit up a disco ball (prob more to hide the fact its all DAT tape and they have noting to play haha), and then at the shows end they shot 2 cannons full of silvery confetti into the crowd, which was freaking awesome.

And then Paul McDermott walked on, right?

Swap everyone else's opinion of The Spine with Mink Car and yup.

I like Mink Car! It has "Mr XCitement" on it!

"Mink Car" is possibly their third best, after the debut and "Flood". It's certainly my most-listened albums of theirs over the last ddecade (not counting the kids albums - I do have kids and TMBG is the only band they request by name). It just goes from strength to strength, I mean out of the gate with "Bangs" and "Cyclops Rock" they've got the humor AND the rock chops in spades. "Wicked Little Critta" is quite funny as I grew up with kids that talked like that, and the guest appearance by Mike Doughty is great. Not a skippable track on the whole thing.

ugh Mink Car has a few good songs but some real duds. like i said upthread, the recent albums have their moments but i feel like they're one of those bands whose studio output has dropped off to the point that pretty much all of the first 6 or so albums beat anything since then.

Not a skippable track? I dunno I like some of the album but it kills me how much better it could have been. If you were obsessed wtih the band and got the TMBG Unlimited + the web release you can hear a lot of the Mink Car songs in their original versions and a lot of them are much, much better. Especially "Cyclops Rock", "Older", "She Thinks She's Edith Head" and "Another First Kiss". Plus a lot of awesome material didn't even get used like "I Am 40". I really have no idea how they compiled that album. Kinda agree with the above though I feel like The Else is about as good as Factory Showroom was. The first 4 or 5 are untouchable though. Just spin tunes like "Puppet Head" or "Number Three" or "We Want a Rock" again...nobody else writes songs like that

yeah the Severe Tire Damage version of "First Kiss" isso much better. Mink Car seemed like it had way too long a gestation period because they weren't sure how to approach doing a new studio album post-Elektra and so they had time to fiddle with the songs too much and cast aside perfectly good ones.

Exactly, I mean they used different producers for each song and that really threw things off, I still think the album's alright in itself but it could have been one of their better albums had they used the better songs and the best takes.

From Facebook:

Huzzah! In support of our next album They Might Be Giants are planning a 45 city US tour starting in September. Two shows in England in July. Album preview ep on iTunes in April, LP later--release date not nailed down yet.

Well it's about time!!

Also, I just found out that Yukihiro Takahashi was the engineer for The Else. What a bizarre piece of trivia...how the hell did that happen? AFAIK he doesn't even engineer his own albums.

have you guys heard the new album yet?

it's pretty good - supposedly a return to the Flood era but most of the tracks are guitar/bass/drums which few of the early songs were

still, after a few listens, it's really growing on me. is almost definitely their best since, say, Factory Showroom, or maybe even Apollo 18

bought it, haven't listened yet. last one i heard (the spine?) was kind of awful, but i'm optimistic about this one. and anyway, they're a staple in my house because i have a little kid who likes the kids records.

I don't think there's any shame in abandoning the tired and stale grown-up records in favour of the fun & delightful kids records at this stage

yeah, there's a lot on those kids records that could've easily been on flood and no one would blink an eye.

yeah I don't think TMBG is anything more than "decent" as a real rock band. the kids albums are actually pretty good and play to their strengths a lot more. the ABCs album is a lot better for adults than I thought it would be. there's a lot of humor on there that's pretty subtle. that said, Join Us is definitely worth a few listens - it doesn't have the colorful, lush arrangements of the first few albums but the songs are pretty addictive. kind of sounds like a mix between The Else and the collection of Podcast songs that came with it.

btw Tyler - The Spine is definitely one of their worst so don't let it discourage you

"Can You Find It?" is such a great song. One of Linnell's very best. These songs used to be about unrequited love or the destruction of a relationship and now it's about finding letters on a graphic. But it sure is beautiful.

hate to triple post here but I have "Celebration" on repeat and it totally rules.
this new album is great.

haha was gonna post "rip frogbs" when i saw this thread was revived

my immediate favorite on first listen is "When Will You Die," which i have weird feelings about because it was obviously written before Osama Bin Laden's death but listening to it so soon after it's hard not to think of how it could easily be interpreted or appropriated as not at all ironic or comedic in that context

"2082" is working for me in it's subtle way.

i don't think "when will you die?" is about anyone in particular, but it fits so well with OBL, as people actually were celebrating on the streets when he was killed

also, i think it may be the best song here. can't get enough of it

Persevering with this. It might be too early to speak (The Else has only just grown on me ffs) but it really does seem like Linnell's songwriting is severely outpacing Flansburgh's, e.g. Let Your Hair Hang Down is one of my favourite TMBG songs of all time and Cloisonné is so self-conscious (even by their standards) that I can't stand hearing it.

Linnell's songwriting is severely outpacing Flansburgh's

isn't this basically true of their entire catalog to different extents though?

It is, but on this album it feels like Linnell's at his peak and Flansburgh is just phoning it in, I mean a really really stark difference.

i actually thought Flansburgh was less annoyingly broad on this album than he'd been on the last few

Join Us is really holding up for me, definitely their best since John Henry or Factory Showroom.

yeah i;ve been enjoying it, haven't listened to it too much, but it seems pretty strong.

Have we done a TMBG albums poll?

Speaking of narratives and bullshit, John Linnell is simply too cool for that other thread isn't he

― imago, Tuesday, 28 April 2026 21:25 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

As the other thread refuses to die, worth restating

Re: The first (to me) disappointing album that was "Factory Showroom"

The best song of that time period (and in the TMBG Top 20 for me) didn't even make the album--"S-E-X-X-Y" b-side "Sensurround." Classic Linnell pop banger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxx5CABtI0M

I'm still baffled by how that didn't make the cut....surely their best B-side ever?? I think the explanation I'd read is that it was too similar to "Spiralling Shape" so one had to go, but that's my favorite song on the album so I for one wouldn't have minded having them both there

yeah it really should be the album opener. i think we've had this conversation before because i can remember championing the Power Rangers soundtrack version as the definitive SenSurround...

haven't listened to John Henry since the poll we did. my feeling is it's too long but it's very consistent, moreso than Apollo 18, so it's hard to know what to cut. a minute of "Sleeping in the Flowers"? axing "Extra Savior-Faire" and "Window" would get a few minutes back. it's a little tiring to listen to the whole thing but the songs are mostly impeccable. I don't think the change to a live band hurt my enjoyment - Apollo 18 already felt like it was inching in that direction

after hearing "XTC vs Adam Ant", I dove into the catalogue of the former and my friend the latter. XTC became one of my favorite bands, and Adam Ant his, but we only ever had a mild appreciation for the other band. which I realize now mimics the rivalry in the song

looking at the track list for Factory Showroom... oof, Flans really fell off. I think I'd rank all of Linnell's songs above all of his, except "Pet Name" is maybe better than "Exquisite Dead Guy"

it would be a good song for Squeeze

I'm sure I gave Nanobots a listen when it first came out, but it must have somehow made zero impression on me at the time. What a fool I was! I revisited it thanks to this thread and I think I've listened to it just about every day for the past week. No skips. Love the songs themselves, but a huge part of what makes it such a great listen is the super clever and varied arrangements throughout. Like, even the straight-ahead rocking parts of "Circular Karate Chop" have those crazy swelling, chopped-up backing vocals and that wild organ sound. (They do great things with backing vocals on a lot of these songs.) And honestly some of the songs just sound beautiful, which isn't something you expect to say about a TMBG album -- vibraphones and bass clarinets are like catnip to me, so I'm mainly thinking of the last section of the album here, "Replicant" especially.

The placement of all the nanosongs in the third quarter of the album makes me think of Lolita Nation, which has all of its shortest, weirdest tracks on side three of four. I have to wonder if LN's sequencing was an influence there, conscious or not.

I've previously noted that they pretty much borrowed Don't Respond, She Can Tell for They Got Lost. I think they've not acknowledged Miller publicly, but...

Linnell has said Sensurround was too stylistically similar to Till My Head Falls Off, so one of them had to go. It had initially been recorded somewhat earlier on, so it appears the newer fast Linnell jam won out https://tmbw.net/wiki/Sensurround

one way to edit John Henry would be to snip out middling songs, but promise yourself that they would have then been improved before showing up on Factory Showroom, to the benefit of both albums.

Part of the joy of the Join Us / Nanobots era, is that Marty Beller really appeared to be channelling drum machine-era TMBG as his biggest influence. The results are wonderful

I never wanted to cut anything from John Henry. Perhaps Unrelated Thing outstays its welcome somewhat. It seems to experiment with what a TMBG album might be like if nearly all the songs were 'normal' length

I guess they have been focusing on a specific album for the first set each night? Friday here was I guess "Lincoln," Saturday was "John Henry" and tonight (when I go) is "Factory Showroom." I admit I don't know that album, but I am not a super-fan or anything.

It's got some great tracks, and some big duds (IMO). Not a horrible balance overall, just a shift away from their earlier standard of 18-19 tracks, making the duds maybe loom larger. But then again, as a youth, I definitely skipped tracks a bunch, and basically thought of it as somewhat slight but consistently satisfying 30-minute mini-album.

But like: Til My Head Falls Off, Spiraling Shape, Exquisite Dead Guy, Metal Detector, Your Own Worst Enemy - those are all canonical TMBG!

It was the last of their four major-label albums, and they’ve released more than twenty since, so the second set might be even more baffling, JiC.

I also love SEXXY, the NYC cover, XTC vs Adam Ant, The Bells Are Ringing, and when they opened shows firing off confetti cannons during James K. Polk it totally ruled. Great pop album!!

I guess they have been focusing on a specific album for the first set each night?

there’s simply no way to tell