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The Else

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They Might Be Giants

 
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The Else
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Avg: 4.0 (291 ratings)

Pair of Johns keep the flood coming

  • We Say...

    Review by Ira Robbins

    "There's only two songs in me and I just wrote the third/ Don't know where I got the inspiration or how I wrote the words/ Spent my whole life just digging up my music's shallow grave/ For the two songs in me and the third one I just made."

    On their first album, using a forum more commonly exploited for unmitigated optimism and boundless hubris, They Might Be Giants turned the greatest fear of musicians — that creativity is a natural resource all too easily depleted — into a genial blast of self-defeating whimsy. But more than a thousand compositions later, the two Johns show no sign of emptying the well of unpredictable originality that is their stock in trade. It's kind of frightening, actually, that — quite apart from the Bob Pollard school of fragment-spewing melodorrheic shovelers — anyone has so many songs in them, and that so many of them are worth hearing. True, there was a time in this adult's life when a combination of the slavish audience adulation and the unstoppable dada ingenuity of the Giants' first flowering could induce witticism overload and sugary head pain, but if too much of a good thing is the strongest complaint one can mount against a gifted band, that's no worse than (to borrow a title from The Else) an "Upside Down Frown." And, as it turns out, time has been good to the Giants. They may not be aging at a pace found on any wall calendar, but the Giants of 2007 are definitely a little more mature and level-headed (but nowhere near stodgy or boring) than the Giants of the Reagan administration.

    If The Else is not as eclectic or compelling a collection as 2004's The Spine (the uber-prolific duo's last "proper" album, which means overlooking a couple of kids' records, a brilliant set of joke songs for Dunkin' Donuts commercials, an insane project in which they wrote and performed a specific song for each venue they played on a tour and who knows what else), its 13 songs don't skimp on melodic strength or lyrical imagination. A few of the ideas here are shockingly familiar ("Take Out the Trash" offers the same sort of dump-that-jerk suggestion as Fountains of Wayne's "Leave the Biker"; "Withered Hope" is a skeletal lovelorn story), but the rest emerge reassuringly from the seats out past third base: "Bee of the Bird of the Moth" (with a horn line that threatens to quote Manfred Mann's "Pretty Flamingo"), the sterling power-pop of "Feign Amnesia" and the grad-school vocabulary of "Contrecoup." (Limerent? Look it up!). "The Mesopotamians," which brings the album to a delightful conclusion, is the ingenious autobiography of a fictional (?) band.

    "There's only two songs in me and I just wrote the third…" That John Linnell and John Flansburgh haven't written themselves up a tree, into a corner or simply out of ideas is a testament to just how wrong they were when they stopped counting at two. (Or three.) Where it all comes from, one can suppose, is The Else.

  • They Say...

    Review by Heather Phares, All Music Guide

    For their twelfth full-length -- and first "rock" album in three years -- They Might Be Giants recruited the Dust Brothers as co-producers, a combination nearly as intriguing as the fact that the duo released The Else digitally via iTunes more than a month before it was issued on CD. Pairing the Dust Brothers' sonic invention with John Linnell and John Flansburgh's winning ways with words and melodies should be a dream collaboration; after all, the producers' work with Beck was just as witty and playful as it was funky and innovative. Nearly every time They Might Be Giants has ventured into territory that might be considered strange (Apollo 18's "Fingertips" mini-songs, their foray into children's music), they've pulled it off with flair. However, The Else is surprisingly -- and at times, a little disappointingly -- straightforward, particularly on its first half. While "I'm Impressed"'s distorted beat reflects the Dust Brothers' influence on the album (though this track isn't one that they produced) and "Take out the Trash" is a brassy, winning admonition to a girl to dump her loser boyfriend, The Else begins with a string of songs that are fun but not especially memorable. Fortunately, the album's second half is much stronger. "With the Dark" rambles playfully from a ballad about a girl who hates sunlight to a lumbering section about a pirate tired of his "nautical dreams" and then into much more surreal territory; likewise "Withered Hope" tells the tale of a sad sack yet sounds like anything but. With its circular wordplay, "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth" feels like a classic TMBG track, as does "The Mesopotamians," which marries one of the album's hookiest melodies with the antics of "Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal and Gilgamesh" and ends up sounding like the theme song for a show about a Monkees-like band set in ancient times. "Contrecoup," which deals with phrenology and other obsolete sciences and words, is another in a long line of They Might Be Giants songs that uses your head for thinking as well as bobbing it to the beat. Indeed, the second half of The Else is so good that it's a little frustrating that the entire album isn't this solid. Still, there are more than enough good moments to keep longtime fans happy. [The CD version of The Else comes with "Cast Your Pod to the Wind," a bonus disc of podcast highlights. For die-hard fans who don't already have the podcasts, this disc is worth the price of admission -- the loungy cover of Joe Meek's "I Hear a New World" and songs about mysterious beards and other TMBG-like phenomena capture the band's most adorably off-the-cuff moments.]

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