Music : The Else

Rating: - best TMBG album in a long time
This album is amazing... fun, funny songs that rock. My favorites are the ultra-catchy "The Cap'm" and hilarious "The Mesopotamians" (check out the video on YouTube), but really the whole CD is amazing. Mine came with the bonus disc "cast your pod to the wind" which has some of my favorite tracks on it. If you're interested in this band, buy this CD!

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Rating: - They are still giants
Another great album from the two John's. Accessible and with some great sing along choruses. It's great that I can keep enjoying them, I first bought Flood in 1990, since then i've bought nearly all the albums before and since.They've developed their sound and influenced many bands. Keep it up.

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Rating: - I'll Use A Complicated Metaphor To Explain Something Simple
Plotting the course and nature of They Might Be Giant's creative output is a lot like trying to map a vast river system. Over the past ten years or so their flow has been channelled through diverging tributaries. They do children's music, they do commercial music ("Malcolm in the Middle," "The Daily Show"), they do music for theater, and they play rock and roll as an impeccably entertaining live band. And while all of this can be read as one interconnected system when viewed from an aerial perspective, each tributary is navigated separately.

The Else is basically the latest mile marker in the continuous stream their full lengths have been travelling since Factory Showroom.

While The Else is at least as good as The Spine and Mink Car, I'm not convinced it couldn't benefit from some editing. TMBG somehow manages to record nearly every song they ever write. It seems to me they allocate certain "types" of songs to their full lengths, a different "type" to their ep's, and delegate a third "type" to their podcasts and compilations. I'm not convinced this is the best approach.

The result is consistent full lengths characterized by lots of well developed but basically conventional (if whimsical) pop songs. The little charming and weird songs that punctuated earlier releases are missing. These songs still exist and appear on an assortment of delightful ep's (ex. The Spine Surfs Alone) which sort of supplement the full lengths. But, unfortunately, there are now big repositories of offal, such as They Got Lost and Cast Your Pod to the Wind where choice songs get buried alive.

If, through editing, They Might Be Giants could integrate the best features of the three "types," they might release records with the kind of dynamics and charm of earlier records like Flood and Apollo 18. I don't say they would be able to recreate the SOUND of those earlier records, but they could recapture the FEEL.

The Else is fine. There are some excellent songs. Frankly, Flansberg's "Take Out the Trash" could be a huge commercial success with a little marketing. Linnell offers two amazing songs that showcase his peerless, peculiar perspective ("Contrecoup," "Withered Hope"). There are also some tracks that cover old ground ("The Mesopotamians" is an updated "Hi, We're the Replacements" and "With the Dark" is a refreshing update to "Fingertips"). Unfortunately, there are some tracks that are hard to love, such as "Upside Down Frown" and "The Cap'm," which, despite their hooks are a little too hokey for my taste.

For TMBG fans, buying The Else is a foregone conclusion. For people less invested in the band, The Else is worthwhile, but be sure to get Flood, Apollo 18, and Factory Showroom too.

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Rating: - Pass play guitar.
This is the 12th album by They Might Be Giants (it says on the CD). It features their usual brand of catchy melodies and peculiar lyrics. Some of TMBG's later efforts (including this one) have met with disfavor with some longtime fans. But I find their new albums to be quite enjoyable, including this one.

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Rating: - Thrilling from start to finish
"The Else" is probably the best TMBG album in a decade, and that's saying a lot when you're talking about one of the few active bands that makes an effort to be creative without sacrificing the quality of their music. All of the songs on the album are catchy enough that the listener shouldn't feel the need to hit the "skip" button, but a few of them turn out to be a little more daring and ambitious than standard pop songs usually are.

So much pop music these days consists of a couple of bars of music set to a beat that lasts just a few seconds, and then the rest of the song repeats this theme without bothering to develop it any. In other words, so much music these days can be summarized in a few bars, and missing the rest of the song hardly matters. Moderately clever lyrics can cover this up somewhat, but rarely can a few drops of wit justify three to five minutes of generic background music, whether made guitars and drums or by a synch machine.

TMBG try to buck that trend, with their best example of music that develops and actually goes somewhere being the song "With the Dark." Predicting the end of that particular song without having heard it before is simply not possible, yet it still feels like a musical trip rather than several bit sewn together, so it works.

This is not to say that the words to the songs on "The Else" are without merit. To the contrary, they are about as catchy as can be hoped for from modern rock musicians, with first prize for lyricism probably going to the album's final song, "The Mesopotamians." Good stuff, that.

If you want recently created music that will neither bore you nor insult your intelligence, you might want to give "The Else" a try.