Lincoln

9.0/10

  They Might Be Giants took a fairly sizable leap forwards on their second album.  It still maintains all of their hallmarks.  Catchy melodies, quirky subject matter, and humor are all here in spades.  Not to mention they include a lot of songs again.  There are still a couple of tracks that are kind of throwaway jokes, but even these seem to be of a much higher quality than the ones on the first album.  There's nothing here that's the equivalent of Boat of Car in terms of pointlessness or unpleasantness.  I'd say every song on here is catchy to some degree or another with the best songs being really stellar.  Some of the best songs of their entire catalog can certainly be found here.  Yet despite how catchy these songs are, this album was actually a bit of a grower for me.  It's often funny or zany but it doesn't hit you over the head with it.  When I was first starting to listen to They Might Be Giants I might have listed this as my least favorite of their albums, but as I got to know it better it really grew in stature, as many of the best albums are wont to do.

  They start the album off with what may be their best song up to this point in Ana Ng.  It's full of killer hooks both in the verse and the chorus.  Once again I'm not quite sure how this song failed to make a huge splash.  Perhaps the Asian sounding name was too exotic for Americans to embrace?  I don't know, I'm just speculating because this is an awesome song.

  The next song I want to mention is Purple Toupee because it's catchy as hell once again.  I also find its subject matter interesting, beyond the goofiness of the image of a purple toupee.  It's interesting because the lyrics seem to be addressing actual historical events and yet somehow they're off.  Like the narrator of the song can't quite remember or didn't understand what he was seeing in the first place.  I don't know exactly how it all ties in to the purple toupee, but there's something intriguing here nonetheless.  I'm not the hugest lyrics guy in the world, but this band certainly has a lot of interesting lyrics and this is a good case of that.

  The Pencil Rain is another example of their strange but interesting lyrics.  They seem to be talking about it literally raining pencils out of the sky, which is an intriguing image.  I wouldn't want to be caught out in such a storm as they mention "the thundering clatter of splintering wood and lives that are claimed."  There is some military imagery in here, so I suppose this is in some way a metaphor for war.

  This brings to mind for all the humor and silliness, they tackle some pretty depressing subjects on here.  Mr. Me for instance has a repeated refrain about how "He ended up really really really sad."  The aforementioned Pencil Rain details people dying brutally.  Santa's Beard is about the narrator's girl cheating on him with a guy dressed in a Santa suit.  They'll Need a Crane is a fairly devastating portrait of a failed relationship.  I've Got a Match seems to be about someone who doesn't want to be in a relationship any more.  Kiss Me Son Of God appears to be a bit of a scathing commentary about religion.

  Then there's Shoehorn With Teeth.  It's a goofy yet somewhat disturbing image, if you think about it.  Then they go on to say "People should get beat up for stating their beliefs."

  It's somewhat easy to overlook the darkness present on this album because it's dressed up in catchy poppy tunes and accompanied by some silly and quirky images.  But honestly these are intelligent guys and they have some dark things on their mind.  They just talk about it in an interesting way, not the normal cut-your-wrists, weepy-voiced, "woe is me" tone that a lot of insufferable "artists" adopt.

  People who dismiss They Might Be Giants as a joke or a novelty band will probably look at the surface of this album and still think that.  But I'd point to this one as in some ways their most serious album.  If they happen to deliver their message in the form of catchy tunes that also sometimes make me chuckle, I'm all in favor of it.