Since the beginning of this year, They Might Be Giants have been releasing a free monthly podcast. Irfan Shah was given a guided tour round some of the highlights so far…
Here they come again, parodic, rhapsodic, flippant and ingenious. They Might Be Giants, a dozen or so albums down the line, are as close to a twenty-first century Bonzo Dog Band as it’s possible to get, with their huge span of musical styles, the twisted joy of the music, their sense of the ridiculous, and the occasional manic outbursts of jazz.
We may know the Giants from their hits ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’ and ‘Boss of Me’ (the theme to Malcolm in the Middle), classics of sugar-coated indie slapstick, but the Podcast Highlights are a timely reminder of how much more there is to the band stylistically.
‘E Eats Everything’, for example, could be an Ibiza floor-filler with lyrics by a script-writer for Sesame Street:
“A hardly has an Appetite and pokes his food too long
B can hardly Bother because all the food is wrong”
‘Hotel Detective In The Future’ is a gloriously po-faced piss-take of arty synth bands while ‘Metal Detector’ and ‘Diving Board’ are They Might Be Giants staples i.e. quirky meditations on mundanity turned into irresistible guitar pop.
‘I Enjoy Being a Boy’ is a Banana Splits cover version! Get in!
‘Miniature Sidewalk Whirlwind’ is about the embarrassment of getting a plastic bag stuck on your leg – a universal experience and therefore a song to unite nations, and the spoken vocal ‘Turtle Songs of North America’ is just weird.
These highlights are all from free podcasts by the group which, since the beginning of the year, have been averaging 500,000 downloads a month. Their output is voluminous and extravagant and their approach to distribution cavalier. Consequently, they have much to offer a cynical world – a quixotic approach to the music industry, a series of polished performances, a string of bizarre subjects, and some pretty cool songs.
And in this age of cheap fame and dubious publicity stunts, who can resist a band whose sense of mischief is worth a thousand celebrity drug habits? Pretty cool stuff. Pretty damn cool.