Apollo 18

8.0/10

  Apollo 18 continues the winning streak for the two Johns.  It maintains the formula of catchy pop songs, quirky subject matter and a lot of songs including a few throwaway tracks.  It also features some of their funniest songs like The Statue Got Me High, Turn Around, and I Palindrome I.

  It kicks off in energetic fashion with the energetic rocker Dig My Grave.  This song probably rocks harder than anything they'd done up to this point and might make you wonder if you're in for a different sort of album.  But the next song is the aforementioned I Palindrome I, which sets you firmly back into traditional They Might Be Giants territory.  It's catchy as all get out and has some funny if dark lyrics about the narrator longing for his mother's eventual death so he will come into money.  The mom in turn has similar feelings.

  The band also has a penchant for educational songs, which we see here in the form of Mammal, which name calls several examples and discusses the warm blood lacking nuclei flowing through their large four chambered hearts.

  We also have some unfettered weirdness on display here.  There's not much to describe Spider other than bizarre.  But it is kind of funny.  There's also Fingertips, a series of bizarre short clips.  I later learned you're supposed to set your CD player to random so the various Fingertips tracks would pop up at different points in between the more traditional songs and serve as sorts of interludes.  When I initially bought this album I got it on a cassette, so there was no possibility of randomizing the order.  Thus I experienced Fingertips as a sort of medley of strangeness.  Maybe it's just because that's how I first encountered it, but I still kind of prefer it that way now.

  Later on Turn Around has some dark, weird, and funny lyrics about doing interpretive dances in graveyards and human skulls on the ground.  I'm not 100% convinced songs like these have anything deeper to say about the human condition, but they're certainly entertaining in a deliciously odd way.

  Apollo 18 was the most recently released TMBG album when I first discovered them so I bought it pretty much at the same time as all their albums that existed at that time.  Thus I was able to listen to it in my initial wave of enthusiasm for discovering a new band.  I find that I like it slightly less than Flood, but it certainly remains an enjoyably catchy and weird listen.  If you're a fan of this band this is a must listen for sure.