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.

Flood

9.5/10

  This is another one of those albums that I just have no objectivity over.  I discovered this album at exactly the right time and it instantly became a huge favorite.  I remember being around fifteen or sixteen years old and attending a summer music camp at NAU.  This guy that was staying a few doors down from me had this album and was constantly playing Istanbul and Particle Man over and over.  I immediately liked both of these songs and so inquired as to who the band was.  He showed me the album cover and I realized there were a whopping 19 tracks on here.  He seemed to really like those two tracks in particular but I talked him into playing the rest of the album for me.  Over the course of the two weeks I was at that camp I became obsessed with almost every song on this album.

  The particular standout for me was Birdhouse in Your Soul, which I still think has to be in consideration for best ever They Might Be Giants song.  It's uber-catchy, the lyrics are quirky and clever and it might even take you a couple listens to realize the narrator of the song is a canary-shaped nightlight.

  This album is bursting at the seams with catchy melodies and odd, funny lyrics from the image of everyone wanting prosthetic foreheads on their real heads in We Want a Rock to writing with a green magic marker on the back of Mr. Horrible's head in Someone Keeps Moving My Chair.

  Dead is another highlight with an unforgettable piano driven melody and memorable lines such as "I'll never see myself in the mirror with my eyes closed" and "I didn't apologize for when I was eight and I made my younger brother have to be my personal slave."

  There are certainly some lesser tracks scattered throughout the album, which is fairly typical form for this band.  My least favorite is probably Hot Cha.  Elsewhere Your Racist Friend is maybe a tiny bit preachy, but I can't argue with the message and the melody's still catchy.  Minimum Wage is a bit of a throwaway joke, but it's one hell of a tossed off joke.  Consisting of the title a hearty "Hee-Ya!" and a whipcrack followed by some bouncy music, it gets its point across in short order and is funny at the same time.

  The intro to Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love always kind of sounded like video game music to me for some reason.  The rest of the song isn't bad but it's never been one of my favorites.  They also include a song named after themselves and it's kind of odd, but also quite catchy.

  So even the not-quite-as-good tracks still offer something worthwhile and don't really detract from the album as a whole.  The rest of the album is so damn quirky and catchy.  As a somewhat nerdy and disaffected teenager it just really spoke to me.  It was so different from everything I'd heard at the time, it made me laugh, and it was just so deliciously odd.  When I got home from that camp I went to a record store as quickly as I could and bought this album.  I was stoked to learn they had other albums, too, and I bought those up as quickly as I could as well.  I liked the other albums, too, but this one was somehow just special.

  I'm not entirely certain this is even the band's best album.  There would be a solid argument to be made for Lincoln or possibly even John Henry.  But this is the one I heard first and personally fell the hardest for.  It's a great place to start if you're new to the band.  It might not be everyone's cup of tea.  Maybe it's a little too weird or nerdy for some people, but the catchy melodies are pretty undeniable.  If you're of the right temperament this could be your new favorite album.

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.  

They Might Be Giants

7.5/10

  Ah... They Might Be Giants.  This is another of my favorite bands from my high school days.  Surprisingly they're still chugging along, at least at the time of this writing.  This band consists of two guys named John from Brooklyn who have an interest in odd subject matter and have a knack for catchy melody.  I've heard this called "nerdy" music, but all I know is they've made me laugh quite a bit and they've lodged many catchy tunes in my head over the years.  Plus I'll take this over some whiny little emo bastard any day.

So this is their first album.  It's self-titled but I always referred to it as the pink album, since that was the color of the sleeve.  They establish much of their modus operandi on this.  The catchy hooky melodies and quirky subject matter are here in spades.  They've also always been very generous as far as the number of songs they include on each album.  This one's no different and features no less that 19 tracks.  Some of them are pretty short and some are just kind of throwaway jokes, but still.  A few of the songs on this album are a little weird even for my tastes, but there are also several fully formed catchy-as-fuck pop songs on here.

This album honestly starts off awesomely.  The first five tracks are all brilliant and catchy.  In a perfect world Don't Let's Start should have been a smash radio hit.  Number Three is perfectly and hilariously placed in the third spot following a very strong opening two tracks, it contains the joke that they only have two songs in them and this is the third one.  They quickly put a lie to the notion that they're only capable of writing two good songs as this album has at least a dozen of them.  Hideaway Folk Family comes in at track five and is catchy as all hell and features some weird fake backwards singing at the end.  Why?  Why not?

The first very slight misstep for me comes with 32 Footsteps.  It's not unlistenable or horrible or anything and it's even still sort of catchy.  It's just kind of weird and not particularly in a funny way.  I'm not really certain what they're going on about here to be honest.

It's followed by the very brief and quirky Toddler Hiway, which is honestly kind of a throwaway joke, but it's a catchy one.  I kind of wish they had developed the song more.

This is followed by another string of strong catchy songs.  Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes is pretty silly, but it's got a hell of a hook.  It's really hard not to get this stuck in the old noggin.  A couple tracks after that we get She's An Angel, an oddly sweet little love song that for my money might feature the catchiest chorus on the whole album.  Plus it has some really funny imagery of racing around in those little Shriner cars.

Have you noticed I've been using the word catchy a lot?  Aside from demonstrating an unimpressive diversity of my vocabulary skills, it's simply the name of the game when it comes to this band.  I'll probably be using that word quite a bit more as I review all their albums.  Catchy is one of my favorite qualities a band can have.  Yes, it can be used in service of really terrible annoying songs, but way too many bands couldn't write a catchy melody to save their lives.

Unfortunately the second half of the album kind of drops the ball a little bit in the catchy department.  There are still a few memorable hooks here, but there are also more of the quirky experimental throwaways that are just kind of weird without being especially funny or clever.  What the hell is Boat of Car about?  I don't have a clue.  It's not especially pleasant to listen to, but it's mercifully short.  I'm not super sure about Chess Piece Face either, but it's also quite short.

I'm re-listening to the second half as I write this and overall maybe the songs are actually a little better than I'm giving them credit for.  They just suffer in comparison to the awesome songs on the earlier part of the album.  There are still quite a few catchy melodies, they're just maybe not quite as catchy and the quirky stuff just seems odd instead of being all that funny.  The end of the album just feels like a slight letdown to me.  But really only slightly.

Overall this is an album bursting with quirky ideas and awesomely catchy hooks.  It's well worth checking out if you like memorable melodies and a slightly skewered sensibility.  It bodes of good things to come and things would soon get even better.

Collapse Into Now

7.5/10

  This ended up being the final R.E.M. album as they announced their breakup shortly after it came out.  I think this ended up being a good album to go out on.  It doesn't do anything innovative whatsoever, but it succeeds in sounding like an R.E.M. album.  All the classic elements are here from the jangly guitar to the Mike Mills backing vocals and most of the songs could have easily fit on other albums.  It serves as sort of a career retrospective in a way, with certain songs being really reminiscent of earlier works.  In many cases this wouldn't be a positive thing but for R.E.M. this far into their career and as their last album, it's kind of what you're looking for.  It's like R.E.M. comfort food or something.

They start off right off the bat with a couple of high energy uptempo songs that wouldn't have been out of place on Accelerate.  One gets the sense that they're still trying to assure you that they haven't slipped back into their Around the Sun style.

The acoustic guitar driven Uberlin really invokes Drive from Automatic for the People without quite being a straight ripoff.  The way Stipe sings the verse with the pauses in between words is really similar to the way he delivered the verses in Drive.  I definitely get the impression this similarity is purposeful and is supposed to kind of put you in the mindframe of Automatic.  The chorus, which is quite nice, goes in another direction entirely.  So it really is a different song, you see.

Later you get the ballad Walk it Back, which sounds like it could have fit on any number of albums from Out of Time to New Adventures in Hi-fi.  It's immediately followed by the aggressive rocker Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter, which could have been on Monster, New Adventures, or maybe even Document.

Final track Blue invokes the hell out of E-Bow the Letter with the spoken word lyrics and atmosphere.  They even went so far as to get Patti Smith to sing backup vocals again.

The album as a whole contains a nice mix of uptempo and slower songs, as well as acoustic and electric arrangements.  The melodies are pretty consistently solid throughout.  To my ears there are no obvious weak links here.  While I can't in any way say this is among their best albums, they most definitely did not drop the ball for their final album, which is kind of a relief in and of itself.

Looking back at their extensive catalog, they definitely have released a high number of above average to really good if not great albums.  Is that enough to put them into the pantheon of classic bands?  In my opinion, yeah, it is, even if I'm not as obsessed with them as I once was.  I don't think I would consider them my favorite band anymore.  My tastes have shifted a little more towards noisy psychedelic stuff, but I always appreciate good melodies and R.E.M. has long delivered those.  I'm also quite aware that I have a fairly strong personal bias towards this band just because they came along at the right time for me.  That said I think their classic albums have stood the test of time well.  I think new generations will continue to discover and enjoy R.E.M. for awhile at least.      

Accelerate

7.0/10

  The world seemed to issue a collective yawn after the release of Around the Sun.  That is, if they weren't loudly grumbling that R.E.M. should have broken up after New Adventures in Hi-Fi, if not even sooner.  Even the band didn't seem to like Around the Sun too much.  It seems like it even sucked the energy out of them.  The four year wait between that album and this one represents the longest gap between any two R.E.M. albums.

Accelerate feels like a conscious effort on the part of the band to not sound like Around the Sun.  Thus the electric guitar rears its head prominently and most of the songs are much more uptempo.  Even the title of the album seems like a blatant advertisement that this is not another album of plodding mid-tempo songs.  They've also addressed the album length problem that's dogged them for a little while now.  This is the shortest album they've released in years and many of the songs don't even break the three minute mark.  As such Accelerate is a brisk listen, which is good, but it may suffer a bit from feeling slight.

For me the renewed sense of energy is definitely a welcome sign.  It really would have kind of sucked if Around the Sun had been their final album just because it wasn't a good note to go out on.  While I don't personally feel Accelerate lives up to their earlier classic material it's certainly a bounce back in the right direction.

You can tell the difference in the energy level right off the bat with Living Well is the Best Revenge.  Peter Buck's electric guitar rips off a riff and some upbeat drums come in.  Stipe joins in after a few bars with much more energetic singing than appeared anywhere on the previous album.  They're wasting no time in letting you know you're not in for a repeat of Around the Sun.  This song is a nice little jolt of adrenaline and wouldn't sound out of place on Lifes Rich Pageant.  That's a good thing.  I think I even hear some much missed Mike Mills backing vocals near the end of it.  They're low in the mix, but it's very welcome to hear them.

The next song Man-Sized Wreath maintains the sound and energy level of the first track.  If the first track was this album's equivalent of Begin the Begin, then this song is its These Days.  I'm relieved to say we're off to a pretty good start so far.

The next song is Supernatural Superserious, which I seem to recall actually getting some airplay.  It's fast-paced like the first two tracks and it's pretty damn catchy.  It might be the best song on the album so far.  Not to mention those are almost certainly Mike Mills backing vocals in the chorus.  They're such an essential part of the R.E.M. sound I really don't understand why they seemed to disappear for awhile there.

Next track Hollow Man brings in some piano and seems to slow down the pace a little, which is actually okay at this point, but even this song brings in some electric guitar and gets more upbeat at the chorus.  It actually makes for a pretty neat trick as it injects a little variety into the album, something the last album was sorely missing.

Houston brings in some jangly minor key acoustic guitar and what sounds like some organ.  It's different sound-wise than anything we've seen so far, which furthers the diversity and variety of the album.  Once again this is a positive thing.

Elsewhere Until the Day is Done almost sounds like it could have been on Automatic for the People and I have to say I find Mr. Richards to be a very catchy tune.  I think it might be my favorite song on the whole album.

Final track I'm Gonna DJ is kind of dumb, but at least they stuck it at the end of the album.  Granted it doesn't end the album on the highest note, but it doesn't interrupt the flow of the rest of the album and you can always skip it.

  Accelerate is a sizable improvement, but it doesn't resonate with me the way the early albums did.  Part of that is timing.  I was an impressionable teenager when I fell head over heels for Out of Time and Automatic for the People.  I had entered my 30's by the time Accelerate came out.  I still like music, but it's not as all-consumingly amazing as it was back then.  I haven't lived with Accelerate like I have with the earlier albums.  It didn't accompany my formative years.  I haven't listened to it hundreds, if not thousands of times.  It's not seared into my brain in the same way.  All of this places it at a bit of an unfair disadvantage as far as my personal estimation goes.  But I'm glad that I like it as much as I do and I'm especially glad that R.E.M. was able to go out on a higher note between this album and the next one, which proved to be their last.

Around the Sun

5.0/10

  The critical consensus seems to be that this is the worst R.E.M. album of all time.  Unfortunately I have to agree with that assessment.  The thing is, it's not horrible or irredeemable, it's just kind of bland.  Taken individually I don't really have a problem with any of the songs, but they're all kind of the same mid-tempo ballad.  There's not a lot of variety on display here and it gets to sound really samey after awhile.  They've done albums in the past that maintain an overall sound to them.  Automatic for the People was largely acoustic while Monster featured the same distorted guitar sound on many of its tracks.  Even Murmur sounds largely of a piece.  It's just the sound they chose this time isn't very interesting.  It's kind of like Automatic-Lite.  Plus the arrangements are just a little boring.  There's not much in the way of electric guitar to be seen and while there are some synths present, they seem to always remain in the realm of "tasteful."  But tasteful isn't what this album needs.  It needs some energy and some diversity.  It needs some more Mike Mills backing vocals.  It ultimately just kind of sounds like they weren't very inspired this time around.

  The thing is I think most of these songs are salvageable.  Like I said, taken individually I don't think they're all that bad, but they're just too similar in sound to each other.  If they had increased the tempo of a few songs or added some more interesting bleeps and bloops to the background it really would have helped.  Plus, like the last few albums, it's too long.  It's kind of a chore to sit through, which makes it feel really long.  Only two songs top the five minute mark this time, but a lot of them are above four minutes still.

  It honestly starts out promisingly enough.  Leaving New York is probably the best song on the album and I dig the part near the end where Stipe is singing different parts of the song at the same time.  So far so good, right?

  Electron Blue is next and it's not really a bad song at all, but it just doesn't seem like it's bringing anything new or interesting to the table.  Still, it's pretty good so not all hope is lost.  After that we get the Outsiders, which is mostly notable for featuring Q-Tip rapping at the end.  The thing is they already did the guest-rapper thing back on Radio Song from Out of Time.  And at least in that song it seemed more integrated to the song as a whole.  Here it feels more tacked on to the end and gimmicky.  And it's not even a new gimmick.

  This kind of seems to start a downward spiral as we get track after track that just sort of fails to impress.  I kind of like High Speed Train a little more than a lot of the other tracks, but it's not enough to right what's kind of a sinking ship.

  Around the Sun really isn't overtly terrible, but in a way that's sort of worse.  I kind of wish it was just a piece of crap unmitigated disaster.  Instead it's just sort of lodged firmly in the middle of the road.  James Taylor could have released this exact same album in 2004 and I wouldn't have blinked an eye.  That's what makes it kind of depressing.  I'd still rather listen to it than the majority of crap that's foisted upon the public, but it's really just a solidly average album from a band that used to be consistently well above average.  I will also allow that this is probably the R.E.M. album that I've listened to the least number of times, so it's possible that it's some kind of grower.  I don't really know it as well as I know their classics and I have difficulty distinguishing a lot of the songs or remembering how they go after the album finishes.  As it stands, I don't hate Around the Sun, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone and I definitely would steer newbies away from this one.