They Might Be Giants - Mink Car
(Restless)
There are seventeen songs on Mink Car, and that’s a good thing in and of
itself. John Linnell and John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants kicked off
their illustrious career in 1986 with a brilliant eponymous debut album that
had nineteen songs on it, each representing a diverse facet of the pair’s
experimental pop minds. Their second (and almost equally excellent) album,
Lincoln, had eighteen. Flood, another remarkably creative record, brought
the tally back up to one less than twenty. But in 1992, the Johns unleashed
Apollo 18, still their crowning achievement: a monstrous masterpiece
technically featuring eighteen songs, but with a singular centerpiece
entitled “Fingertips” that actually embodied twenty different refrains, and
therefore, twenty different track indexes. On Apollo 18, then, the tracks
added up to thirty-eight. That’s double their previous high mark, and even
with twenty songs on their follow-up and their first full-band outing, John
Henry, they couldn’t top that number.
Is it a coincidence that Apollo 18, the record with the most tracks, is
still their defining masterpiece? Well, who’s to say. But I don’t believe
it’s a coincidence that their last album remains their weakest. See, 1996’s
Factory Showroom only brought thirteen tracks to the table. (Fourteen, if
you count the throw-away hidden track before track one.) It had some very
good songs, but it also had more lukewarm clunkers than ever before, as well
as one of the band’s incredibly few terrible songs, “XTC vs. Adam Ant.” The
ratio from song ideas to good song ideas suddenly grew smaller.
Five long years later, Mink Car arrives as TMBG’s seventh studio album, the
amount of songs makes a considerable jump almost back to where the band
started, and, in a lovely correlation, so does the ratio. Mink Car
definitely improves upon Factory Showroom. For some, that may not be saying
much, and I will admit that it does no more than that; it’s their second
weakest release. But standing on its own, Mink Car is a great example of
Flansburgh, Linnell, and additional talent finding new sounds to make while
remaining rooted in the initial energy that makes them so appealing.
These seventeen songs really only have one considerable atrocity. Does
anyone remember “First Kiss” from their 1998 live compilation, Severe Tire
Damage? You may or may not; it’s not entirely memorable, not one of the
band’s best works, but it’s a pleasant little pop song with a revved-up
liveliness that made it quite tolerable indeed. Now, as a melody that was
not in dire need of being revisited, it inexplicably arrives on Mink Car as
“Another First Kiss.” With this, the Johns add a completely unwelcome and
wretched format to their repertoire: a slower, straightforward adult
contemporary tune straight out of the Shawn Mullins cliché bag. Gently
picked acoustic guitar, dumb lyrics made sappier with super-understated
vocal delivery, and the most generic of drum loops accompany this miserable
adaptation. It’s the band’s lowest career moment yet, hands down.
Other songs are remade from their previous incarnations as well. Although
none of the originals have appeared on albums, their appearances in concert,
official MP3’s, and the Dial-a-Song service (the number of which is hidden
on Mink Car's cover) have charted their evolution to where they can be found
here. The most disappointing is “Finished with Lies.” On its own, the
somewhat thin Beatles-pop tribute is tolerable and even mildly enjoyable,
but it pales in contrast to its original form, a funereal organ-based dirge
with a wonderful sense of ironic melodrama. “Now, I’m telling the truth/ I’m
finished with lies,” Linnell would slowly croon; “If you don’t believe me
now/ You’ll never believe me now.” Here, its irony is in the absence of such
melodrama, but it doesn’t succeed on such a poignant level. The most
successful is “Man, It’s So Loud in Here,” originally performed in concert
only as a traditional rocker but now reworked as a shameless 80’s dance mix,
with bleeping drum machines and vocoders abound. Suddenly, in a new
lyrically appropriate context, the refrain becomes marvelously suitable:
“Baby, check this out, I’ve got something to say/ Man, it’s so loud in here/
When they stop the drum machines and I can think again/ I’ll remember what
it was.”
The album’s strongest track, “Bangs,” can also be found in a previous
form on TMBG’s collaboration with McSweeney’s literary journal, on which
they recorded a song for nearly every article in the issue and included a CD
in the back. (Almost thirty-eight original contributions, so it’s great,
natch.) Although this is a new recording, it remains the band’s greatest pop
melody since “I Palindrome I” graced Apollo 18. Linnell sings a love song,
although it’s not just as simple as that. He loves the girl’s haircut, and
only her haircut, and he rhapsodizes in a verbose fashion on what makes it
quite so appealing: “Bangs/ Are like a pocket T-shirt/ As casual as that,
while fully intentional.” It’s strange, adorable, and catchy as all get out.
Lead guitarist Dan Miller provides a lovely counter-melody during the
verses, while J. Flansburgh rocks out on rhythm.
It’s fairly safe to say that Linnell provides the record’s strongest
contributions. “Hopeless Bleak Despair” and “My Man” both provide noteworthy
melodies with his traditional excellent oddball subject matter. The former
is a grandiose, upbeat rocker to play against the tale of an introvert who’s
simply depressed until he dies; the latter is a sugary synth-pop tone poem
sung from the point of view of a paralyzed man’s brain. To give Flansburgh
his fair share, however, he does arrange some great moments. “Drink!” is,
musically, an old-fashioned drinking song, but lyrically, somewhat off
kilter (“Drink, drink, to no big surprise/ But what words rhyme with ‘buried
alive’?”). He brings a swanky square’s approach to the lead vocals of “Yeh
Yeh,” a funky updated cover of a 50’s dance tune made popular by Georgie
Fame. And he helps close Mink Car fittingly with the mellow
keyboards-and-drum-machine pop of “Working Undercover for the Man,” about a
government agent posing as a rock star. He sings of “Planning midnight raids
on our unsuspecting fans/ While the roadies rig the video surveillance van”
amidst the most infectious “sha-la-la”s in recent (or even fairly distant)
memory.
After all this, I’ve only detailed nine of the songs on Mink Car. That
leaves eight more, which means almost half of the album has not been discussed.
So as to not leave you with the impression that these nine songs--excuse
me, these eight good songs--are the only worthwhile songs on the record,
let me close with a disclaimer. The whole album is good. There are eight
more songs in store that will provide enjoyment. It is a surprisingly
cohesive effort, despite still covering musical territory that’s all over
the quirk-pop map. But that shouldn’t be a surprise, since that’s what the
Johns are best at doing, even now. In the meantime, I wouldn’t be against
them taking a fairly lengthy time working on their next record, searching
for the elusive eighteenth, nineteenth, thirty-ninth track that we can only
hope they haven’t completely lost.
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