Hope That I Get Polled Before I Die: THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS 1982-2002 POLL - Voting, Campaigning, Discussing

Flood Show 30/11/2000

I thought this was in Aus but I had to check my old old OLLLLD blog from 2001 and the show I saw was in Dec 2001, at which they did all of Flood (plus Fingertips, boss of me and a few other things). All this time I thought it'd been a spontaneous first time they'd done that! Bah.

favorite part of that show is how they forget the order of the tracks

The released show was the first time they'd done it; your show was was the fifth total, but two of those had been by "Sapphire Bullets" as support act.

Until two weeks ago, they'd had a Reverse Flood Show up for free download for two and a half years, recorded either at the Corner in Melbourne or The Zoo in Brisbane in 2013.

I just spontaneously claimed out loud that "I built a little empire out of some crazy garbage called the blood of the exploited working class". I got funny looks.

That line's been playing in my head a lot these last weeks, too.

This Mono Puff album is better than I remembered!

Which one? I'm not a big fan of either but they each have a couple standout moments

"Unsupervised, I Hit My Head" is the kind of fun energetic song that Linnell usually sings

Unsupervised

The big one is The World's Address, written by Linnell but sung by Flans. I think there are more examples

I really liked Unsupervised at the time; listened to It's Fun To Steal yesterday for the first time, and it's really not up to par.

Linnell on writing: "We write pretty independently, and we've had a number of tracks in the recent past where we've collaborated. There's one shining exception, which is the song "Mink Car" off of Mink Car we actually wrote sitting at a piano in this Leopold and Loeb sort of way. We don't really ever do that."

Just sent my ballot off. Making the first pass I had 96 tracks, but ranking them was near impossible and I didn't think too much about it. The song that ended up being my #1 surprised me. I think this band's strength is their breadth and variety rather than their quality on single songs, so it's harder to rank songs above others

recall interviews saying that they write a lot of uncredited stuff for TV and commercials, sorta as a 'day job')

Lots of ads and TV themes and such in the 2003-2018 list, but here are four ads they did for Diet Dr Pepper in 2001.

https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/21591/chimps/diet-dr-pepper

https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/21592/holland-globetrotters/diet-dr-pepper

https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/28111/retirement-village-people/diet-dr-pepper

https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/19921/xga/diet-dr-pepper

So I started this list because hell why not, I'm an actual sized TMBG fan and whatnot but I thought dammit I'll probably only be able to come up with 20 or 30 songs... oh crap theres heaps argh.

Luckily I tapped out after Mink Car so thats where I'll stop (and Im interested to note much of my faves are the LTW/Factory Showroom era!).

BTW sic - it occurs to me to ask if you had a hand in a certain ragey TMBG spesh on TeeVee in the early aughts? :) (I still have it all on video!)

I just sent mine in - ranking 100 songs is tough, tbh after 40 or so I just started listing stuff. But I stand behind it

I'm listening to lots of the 1988-94 B-sides for the first time rn and bemoaning the never-existed-ness of the Superfueled Freakcicle compilation

30 years since I first heard it and I still get goosebumps from "Don't Let's Start" every damn time

oops I accidentally downloaded over 200 Dial-A-Songs from the 20th century, and now might need to extend this poll by a couple of months to see if they unlock any of the eligible songs for me

Gonna send soon, I would say the top 40 or so are ranked, then there's a group of "next 30" and a group of "next 20" which are pretty impossible for me to meaningfully distinguish

Are we just going to end up with a jillion tracks each with a couple points? :)

Sent!

Are we just going to end up with a jillion tracks each with a couple points? :)

I think there'll be a decent amount of conensus near the top but some surprise high placers! Basically because that's what happens in every poll!

I mean never forget that the ILX REM poll had big canonical hits in positions 2-5 and "Harborcoat" won

it was before my time but wasn't the REM poll done in some weird run-off format so that only two songs from each album could place?

been slowly putting my ballot together for this. i still find TMBG to be a kinda frustrating band because they're so good at writing off-kilter pop songs but a lot of the time they're much more interested in being way more off-kilter than i really care for so listening to a whole album is a strange experience

^ Agreed. I was surprised to find than even Lincoln, which probably contains some of their highest highs, contains more than a few tracks I just didn't want to sit through at all nowadays. (That said, I think I already remembered it as the patchiest of the first few LPs, so...)

yeah i fucked up with the REM poll by using the album poll thread results as the basis for a short list of eligible songs. it was kinda early in the days of these things, but not really early enough that i should have thought that was a good idea. the countdown is still a pretty dope REM playlist tho imho.

even Lincoln, which probably contains some of their highest highs, contains more than a few tracks I just didn't want to sit through at all nowadays

haha yeah I now have "Cage and Aquarium" stuck in my head and I really dislike that song.

this is the dawning of the

i think apollo 18 might be their most consistent album, but it doesn't quite reach the same heights as the previous ones

Flood is definitely most consistent for me, even the totally throwaway songs are great

finalizing a ballot now. ranking is hard.

he ended up sad!

finalizing a ballot now. ranking is hard.

I've got 70-some selected and not sure where anything goes after #1

sent a 40+ track ballot

oh shit this is today

Back in 2001, I didn't have enough hard drive space to keep more than a couple of months of TMBG Unlimited, so I shared my login with another They-listener who burnt the 128kbps files as audio CDs. After finding a torrent last week, it took almost as long to work out which songs were still exclusive to the service, tag them and make Live and Studio playlists as it did to listen through everything.

Currently listening to State Songs for the first time ever. Doubt that I'm going to listen closely enough to the McSweeney's album or People Are Wrong! to add any of their pieces to my ballot.

the McSweeny's disc has some pretty good parts - lots of tasty instrumental bits and experimental stuff. "I Am 40" really feels like one of those great demos that should've become a proper single but somehow didn't. I also like the Doughty song a lot. not exactly something I wanna listen to in full anymore but every TMBG fan should hear it once at least

Sent in my ballot! 99 songs! This has been a hectic week with work stuff and getting a cold so I didn't give it my normal obsessive combing-over... but I feel like the stuff I like more is definitely towards the top and it's a great lineup of material, with room for some more oddball tracks that would never have even made it into my Excel sheet if I'd known I was going to be working towards a 20- or 40-track ballot. Woo!

also surprised myself to realize that i rank apollo 18 below factory showroom. kinda figured the first four would be an untouchable bloc but looking at the tracklist, there's an awful lot i've never really gone for, like "the guitar" and "she's actual size" and "if i wasn't shy." maybe the moment in which the Flans I Dislike emerges. "space suit" and "i palindrome i" are fucking masterpieces though.

i like the guitar

the lower reaches of my bracket are packed with some of the most novel of their novelties

You got mine, right sic?

almost done with my ballot, it should be somewhere around 40 songs i think. definitely surprised by how well Factory Showroom ended up in mine

Wish I could say I'd managed to listen to every single eligible song in time -- I didn't -- and to be honest I didn't end up listing any new-to-me true obscurities. But I did put on some songs from Mink Car, an album I didn't like at all when it came out and forgot about, only to find now on relisten that there are some tunes on there I've been humming in my head for years without knowing where they were from.

I'll start compiling ballots before midnight but if any drift in over the weekend, that's fine. Especially from the Antipodean contingent!

I think only two ppl have ranked albums so far, so I might do a full 20 myself just to make it interesting.

(got yours eephus!)

Ballot sent!

My #s 1 through 10 are pretty solid, after that is chaos.

Turns out I really don't like "Factory Showroom"--not one song made my 75-song ballot.

I came to like quite a bit of Factory Showroom myself, and voted for a couple of tracks. I'd given it only scant attention previously. Meanwhile John Henry remained quite impenetrable on this zillionth attempt to come to terms with it.

I take it frogbs is the voter who probably wouldn't use that email address for a job application?

I have straight up not had time to order/send mine and wont for a day or 2. Am I too late?

lmao how'd you know